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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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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Adam Rolston, a retired rugby player from Northern Ireland, recently completed the longest hole of golf in history, a feat that saw him hitting a golf ball a whopping 20,093 times over a distance of around 2,000 kilometers, across the deserts and mountain ranges of Mongolia.

28-year-old Rolston came up with the idea for this unique challenge while talking to former rugby colleague, Ron Rutland, in Kenya. Rutland had completed an epic 26,000-kilometer cycling adventure through every country in Africa, before arriving in South Africa to see his national rugby team compete against Japan in the 2015 World Cup. The incredible story got Adam thinking about a similar adventure, only golf-related. He started talking to his friends about it, but they all said that it couldn’t be done, which only made him want to try it even more.

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A 45-year-old actress from Germany has been injecting herself with Bacillus F, a 3.5 million-year-old bacteria from the Siberian permafrost, to stop the effects of aging.

The woman, who goes by the moniker Manoush, describes herself as a “human lab rat” for being the first person in the world to inject herself with Bacillus F, an ancient bacteria whose cells apparently show no signs of aging. She has been doing it for the past three months and claims it is already making her look and feel younger than her age.

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After realizing that many of the men using online dating services were trying to find extra wives, an Indonesian software developer decided to make it easier for them by creating a dedicated polygamy dating app.

A year ago, while browsing through various Indonesian dating websites, Lindu Pranayama noticed that many of the visitors were actually married men searching for a second or third wives. Unfortunately for them, the vast majority of online dating services don’t offer any options for polygamists, so he decided to create “AyoPoligami” – which translated as “Let’s Do Polygamy – a new smartphone app that caters specifically to their needs.

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53-year-old Juana Escudero is alive and well, but she’s been struggling to prove it for the last seven years. Following an administrative error, she was registered as deceased, and has been unable to accomplish simple tasks, like renewing her driver’s license or scheduling a doctor’s appointment, ever since. Escudero has become so desperate to fix things that she now wants to dig up her own grave to prove that she’s not the one buried there.

It all started seven years ago, when a woman whose name and date of birth matched Juana Escudero’s perfectly died in Malaga, Spain. Even though the protagonist of this story was alive and well in Alcalá de Guadaíra, a town near Seville, the strange coincidence caused their Social Security data to clash, and the living Escudero has been dead to the Government ever since. She and her family thought it was funny at first, but they’ve stopped laughing at it for a long time now.

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Catt Gallinger, a young woman from Canada, is using her own experience to make people to think twice and do their research before getting an eyeball tattoo. In her case, the botched procedure left her with blurry vision in her left eye and purple discharge coming out of it.

Gallinger, from Ottawa, Canada, said that she decided to get an eyeball tattoo so that she would “feel more at home in my body”, but never imagined it would end up costing her her sight. Soon after coloring the white of her left eyeball purple, the 24-year-old pet nutritionist noticed purple discharge oozing out of it. She went to the hospital, where doctors administered antibiotic drops and sent her home. Unfortunately, things got even worse after that. Her eye became swollen shut, and after doctors used steroids to alleviate her symptoms, the tattoo became congealed around her cornea, affecting her vision and causing severe discomfort.

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It’s no secret that Japanese men have a thing for maids, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some businesses try to use their popularity as an advantage over the competition. Like this new programming school in Shibuya, Tokyo, that is trying to attract male students by having cute maids studying alongside them.

MadeInMaidFamily is one of many trade schools in Tokyo, so its founders knew that they had to come up with something special to give them an edge in a very competitive market. Their solution – cute maids to keep male students coming back and motivate them to hone their programming skills. The lessons are designed to encourage interaction between students with the maids asking and offering help to the guys.

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In order to show people that basic healthcare needn’t be expensive and that recyclable trash has value, a young Indonesian entrepreneur came up with the ingenious idea of allowing the poor to pay for their healthcare with garbage.

The Garbage Clinical Insurance thought up by Indonesian health care entrepreneur Gamal Albinsaid may sound like a laudable idea that’s doomed to fail in the long-term, but it’s actually been working for seven years now, and the unique model has already been copied by others across Indonesia. Inspired by others’ desire to help the poor access basic healthcare by recycling waste, Gamal Albinsaid has actually put together a free 70-page startup manual for businesses looking to get into garbage health insurance, instead of franchising his innovation.

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Sick of playing the same old Halloween pranks every year? Want two pull an original bone-chilling Halloween prank on your friends or family? One Dallas doughnut shop has you covered with a scary clown doughnut delivery service.

Riding the wave of the recent Box Office hit Stephen King’s It, the Hurts Donut shop has decided to implement a new, Halloween-themed delivery option for their delicious treats . For just $5 extra, you can have your donuts delivered by a person dressed as a menacing real-life Pennywise and subsequently scare the pants off of your unsuspecting friends and family members. Not only will this clown deliver a fantastic fright, but he will immediately make amends for your prank by handing the recipient a dozen of Hurts’ delicious treats! Who can stay mad while chowing down on homemade donuts, glazed to perfection?

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It’s an odd day when you have to question an old, devout Catholic woman’s morals for attending too many funerals. And yet, that’s the position many have been placed in by 65-year-old Theresa Doyle, from Slough, in the UK, who has been attending every wake at her church for over 14 years now. That would probably be considered commendable on her part, if not for the many accusations that she’s been doing it just to raid the free buffet. 

Theresa Doyle’s funeral crashing habit recently made news headlines in the UK, with several of her neighbors and family members of deceased people whose wakes and funeral services she has attended over the years, claiming that she intrudes on people in their time of grief just so she can fill her stomach. She just shows up, pretends to have known the deceased and sometimes even chats with their friends and family, before grazing the buffet “like there’s no tomorrow”. Sometimes, she allegedly even takes some of the food to go.

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On the surface, Japan’s newest stock exchange platform, Valu, may seem like an innovative game changer in that it allows users to sell shares in themselves. The goal of which, for many, is to raise money to start a business or work on personal/freelance projects within their profession. That being said, however, there is at least one kink the company still needs to iron out if they wish to take Valu to the next level – keeping stock buyers from being conned by those just looking to make a quick buck at others’ expense.

Which is exactly what happened this week when a Japanese Youtuber who goes by the name of Hikaru exploited one of Valu’s features to basically cash out on his popularity. While the concept of selling stocks in oneself may seem very similar to basic crowdfunding, Valu also allows the trading of tokens called “VA” between those who list them, and the tokens are also exchangeable with bitcoin. So Hikaru used his popularity to boost the price of his stocks, and then sold them at a huge profit.

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Fall is here and so is the crisp sweater weather. This year, however, tree leaves won’t be the only thing changing color as it gets colder, thanks to this line of innovative thermo-sensitive sweaters from Stone Island.   Stone Island’s “Ice Knit” sweater made out of color changing yarn.

Italian high-end men’s clothing brand Stone Island is known for experimenting with unconventional fabric treatments and coming up with all kinds of impressive innovations. For their Spring 2017 collection, they introduced something called “hand corrosion technique” that allowed garments to be faded by hand, using a special corrosion paste, and for autumn, they recently unveiled a line of thermo-sensitive sweaters that change color depending on the air temperature.

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Getting a divorce is never easy for anyone involved, but it is particularly difficult at the Yibin People’s Court, in China’s Sichuan Province, where one magistrate recently implemented a divorce exam that both the husband and the wife must fail in order for their divorce application to be approved.

The divorce exam is the brainchild of Wang Shiyu, a judge at the People’s Court of Yibin County, who, after noticing that divorces accounted for an alarmingly large percentage of the court’s cases, decided to do something about it. His intention was to make couples think twice before ending their marriage, and also give them an opportunity to reminisce the good times they had together. So he came up with a series of questions for both husband and wife, which they must answer separately. If they score under 60, Wang approves their divorce application, if not, well, they have to keep working on their marriage, whether they like it or not.

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As a teacher,  if you want your middle school students to get off their smartphones phones and and actually pay attention in class, you have to get creative. Take Oregon teacher Kyle Hubler for example, who transformed his classroom into an amazingly detailed, Harry Potter inspired dreamland – equipped with wands, owls, and costumes!

Hubler, who teaches seventh and eighth graders at Evergreen Middle School in Hillsboro, first implemented Harry Potter-themed elements to his classroom, last year, and the students loved it. So when he heard that he would moving to a new classroom for the 2017-2018 school year, he decided to go all out and turn into a real-life version of Hogwarts.

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