Mayutamu, a 16-year-old male teenager from Japan, has been getting attention for his ability to pose as a girl, using makeup and female clothing. The 16-year-old teen rose to fame thanks to his job at a unique maid cafe in Tokyo’s Akihabara district. Maid cafes are really popular in Japan, with Akihabara alone being home to dozens of them, but none quite like ‘NEWTYPE’. This establishment is known as a ‘pseudo-girl’ maid cafe, because all the waiting staff is actually made up of boys posing as female maids. Among all the maids, Maytamu stood out as the most feminine of all, with many people confessing that they would have never guessed he was a boy. Read More »

Devised by a Tokyo hair salon during the Covid-19 pandemic to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the ‘Silent Cut’ service is becoming increasingly popular in Japan. As a way of curbing the spread of the coronavirus during the Covid-19 pandemic, authorities in Japan started promoting “no conversation” or “less conversation” policies in schools, shops and supermarkets. Less talking meant fewer risks of spreading the virus via saliva droplets, so everyone understood and complied, but the two policies seemed incompatible with businesses like hair salons and barber shops, where conversation is basically part of the service. However, one Tokyo salon decided to implement the ‘silent cut’ service and it proved so popular that others quickly followed suit and kept it even after pandemic-related restrictions were lifted. Read More »

Cleveland-based company Save My Ink Forever offers people the opportunity to have their tattoos preserved as artworks after they pass away. Third-generation mortician Michael Sherwood and his son Kyle came up with the idea for Save My Ink Forever a few years back, while having a few drinks with some friends. One of them said that he would like his ink preserved somehow and asked the Sherwoods how he should go about doing that. They laughed at the question at first, but their buddy pushed the issue and it got the two morticians thinking. Tattoos mean a lot to the people who have them inked on their bodies, as well as to their families, so it made sense that some of them would like them preserved. After devising a technique for removing and preserving tattoos, the Sherwoods founded Save My Ink Forever and started taking orders. Read More »

Lorikeet Paralysis Syndrome (LPS) is a seasonal disease that occurs every year between October and June, causing lorikeets to drop out of the sky and become unable to move. Ornithologists and veterinarians have known about Lorikeet Paralysis Syndrome for many years now, but despite their best efforts, the cause of the disease has remained a mystery. That is particularly alarming because the disease affects thousands of birds every year, and proves fatal to many of them, rendering them unable to feed or escape predators. Cases of LPS have been reported in Australia since 1970, and although scientists have been able to eliminate some probable causes, they still don’t know what causes it. Read More »

A new online “profession” is making news headlines in Brazil. Attractive women will attempt to seduce clients’ husbands and then provide proof of their faithfulness. Brazilian loyalty inspectors have become very popular on social networks like TikTok and Instagram. They are usually young, attractive women who charge between 20 reals ($4) and 150 reals ($30) to test men’s loyalty to their wives or girlfriends online, and then provide proof to their clients. Testing usually involves sliding into their targets’ DMs, approaching them on WhatsApp or simply pretending to have obtained their contacts from a mutual acquaintance. They take screenshots of conversations with their marks, any photos that they send, and then hand them all to their partners as proof of their loyalty, or lack-there-of. Read More »

An 18-year-old lioness has baffled staff at a zoo in Kansas after growing an “awkward teenage mane” after the pride’s last male lion passed away. Looking at Zuri, you’d think she was a young lion growing his mane for the first time, but she is actually an 18-year-old female. That makes the mane around her neck pretty unusual, with only a handful of similar cases reported in the past. The lioness reportedly started growing a mane soon after the last male lion at Topeka Zoo in Kansas passed away in October of 2020. Although zookeepers don’t believe there is any connection between the lack of a male lion and Zuri’s mane, they do admit that the lioness has gotten feistier since growing the new fur, growling, snarling, and roaring more often than before. Read More »

A Pittsburgh-based robotics and engineering startup recently unveiled Moonwalkers, a pair of battery-powered shoes that it claims can boost walk speeds by up to 250%. At first glance, Moonwalkers look like a pair of futuristic rollerskates, but there is actually a lot more to them than that. You’re actually meant to walk with them the way you would regular shoes or sneakers, letting the motorized wheels put a spring in your step. Powered by a state-of-the-art brushless DC motor, this ingenious contraption is actually a platform that can be attached to a wide variety of footwear to significantly increase your walking speed up to a reported 7mph/11kph. For comparison, humans’ average walking speed ranges from 2.5 to 4 mph. The sensation of walking with the world’s fastest shoes has been compared to that of walking on a ‘moving walkway’ in an airport. Read More »

An archery master recently set a new Guinness Record by shooting seven consecutive arrows through a tiny keyhole using a traditional Ottoman bow. Lars Andersen is often hailed as the world’s ultimate archer, performing feats that most us mere mortals can only dream about. He is the only person capable of shooting 10 arrows in just 4.9 seconds, he can shoot arrows that turn in mid-flight, and shoot while holding multiple arrows in his draw hand. Recently, Andersen added another feather to his already impressive cap by shooting seven consecutive arrows through a keyhole less than 10mm in size, thus setting a new Guinness record. Read More »

A young French woman has been raising eyebrows on the internet for using OnlyFans in a rather unusual way – letting her fans make the important decisions in her life. OnlyFans is usually associated with adult content that fans can access by paying an annual fee, but Laurie, a 23-year-old woman from Paris has found a way of keeping things interesting for her fans while keeping most of her clothes on. Although she does post the odd lingerie photo for her OnlyFans subscribers, Laurie keeps everyone happy by allowing them to vote on different things going on in her life, from simple things like what she should have for lunch on a given day, to life-changing decisions like quitting school or breaking up with her boyfriend. Read More »

In 1994, a man was involved in a serious car accident that should have left him with at least a few broken bones. But he suffered no fractures at all, because he had the densest, strongest bones anyone had ever seen. When doctors looked at the X-rays of the man involved in the car accident – his name was never disclosed to the public – not only did they notice no fracture, but also that his bones seem to be unusually dense, eight times denser than normal, to be precise. This was unlike anything they had ever seen or even heard of before, so they referred the man to Karl Insogna, the director of the Yale Bone Center. Insogna performed additional tests, but after failing to discover a cause for this unusual bone density or any negative effects associated with it, he sent the man on his way. As fate would have it, a few years later, the researcher would come across a few people with similarly dense bones, which turned out to be distantly related to that remarkable man he’d examined… Read More »

An Australian man has become known as the COPD Athlete because of his incredible ability to run entire marathons despite having only 30 percent lung capacity as a result of an incurable and progressive condition. Russell Winwood was diagnosed with COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease) in 2011. By that time, the Brisbane native had already turned his life around, having survived a stroke at age 36. He had given up smoking, cut down on drinking alcohol, started eating better, and, most importantly, he had taken up sports. For years, he competed in varying distances of triathlons, from sprint to Half Ironman and even a few ultra-marathons. Everything was going great, but at one point Winwood noticed that his usual training felt harder and he found it difficult to breathe. That’s when he received his COPD diagnosis, along with the warning that his lungs were operating at less than 30 percent capacity. Read More »

Marlene Engelhorn is not your average millionaire. At age 29, she has more money than she knows what to do with, so she has decided to give away 90 to 95 percent of her inheritance of tens of millions of dollars. Marlene Engelhorn is the granddaughter of 94-year-old Traudl Engelhorn-Vechiatto, a member of the famed German industrial family whose patriarch, Friedrich Engelhorn, founded the chemical giant BASF in 1865. Traudl’s brother-in-law, Curt, ran the family business until 1997, when it was sold to Roche for about $11 billion. At the time of the sale, Marlene’s grandmother received approximately $2.45 billion, a veritable fortune that ballooned to $4.2 billion, at the time of her death, earlier this year. Marlene Engelhorn now stands to inherit tens of millions of dollars, but she doesn’t want it. Read More »

French champagne brand G.H. Mumm has poured a lot of time and resources into developing a futuristic champagne bottle that can be used in space. The Mumm Cordon Rouge Stellar is the first champagne designed specifically for space travel. It comes in a half-glass bottle and features a specially-designed stainless steel opening-closing device that curves over the classic cork. The unique bottle apparently features a finger-controlled valve which, when engaged, releases a globule of champagne spheres. Astronauts or space tourists can then scoop the drink out of the air using special glasses that resemble tiny egg cups. Read More »

A 19-year-old man and a 56-year-old grandmother-of-three in Thailand have been making international news headlines after getting engaged to be married. Wuthichai Chantaraj, 19, met his fiance, Janla Namuangrak, 56, almost 10 years ago, when the woman moved next to his family home in the Akat Amnuay district of Thailand’s Sakhon Nakhon province. Their first real interaction occurred when Janla asked the 10-year-old boy to help her move some potted plants, and from that day on Wuthichai would often drop by the divorced woman’s house to play and help her with chores. The two describe their early relationship as a friendship, but when Wuthichai turned 17, he started developing feelings for Janla, and they eventually became a couple. They only announced their romance to their families at the start of this year, and their love story has been making headlines in Thailand ever since. Read More »

Science, a Japanese technology company specializing in bathroom and kitchen innovation, recently unveiled plans to produce a washing machine for humans. Believe it or not, the concept of a human washing machine isn’t new. At the 1970 Osaka Expo, Japanese electronics giant Sanyo Electric showcased its ‘Ultrasonic Bath’, a human washing machine that cleaned, massaged, and dried the occupant in a fully-automated 15-minute cycle”. The concept never really took off as a commercial product, but now another Japanese technology company wants to take a shot at it, promising to deliver a modern take on the human washing machine by 2025. Read More »