When he opened his first scratching salon in the Bao’an district of Shenzhen, China, Zhang wasn’t in the best of places. After graduating from a little-known university, he changed jobs seven times in a year before starting two businesses that failed in a short period of time. Still, he wasn’t afraid to take a chance on a unique scratching salon. His big bet paid off!

Shortly after opening his first scratching salon, he opened a second one, both of which now generate around 100,000 yuan ($15,000) per month. He only started the unique business in May, but Zhang claims it is already profitable and he now plans to expand nationwide with 100 new locations. He also wants to turn scratching into a recognized career choice.

“People in big cities generally have high stress levels, and demand for this kind of service is strong,” Zhang told Sinchew Daily. “Some customers tell us our service is more relaxing than a massage, and we already have many regulars.”

The service offered by Zhang Xiaochao’s scratching salon is very straightforward – customers lie on their backs as staff wearing pointy plastic fingernails scratch their bodies. Zhang claims that he had to research scratching techniques and even invent some from scratch because there was simply no similar service to take inspiration from.

Zhang charges 300 yuan ($41) per hour of scratching, adding that his unique service is aimed at people looking to relieve stress and improve the quality of their sleep.

What made Başar’s case stand out from others resolved during the special operation was the shocking discovery that he had been living as a woman for years, adopting his sister’s identity and changing his appearance to the point where he became unrecognizable.

It’s unclear how police officers tracked down Tuğrul Başar after so many years, but it is believed that they used surveillance to monitor his family and known associates. That’s how they came to discover that there were two young ladies living in his sister’s home, both of whom apparently used the same identity when going out.

According to police reports, Başar’s transformation was so radical that they could no longer rely on mugshots from years ago to identify him. They resorted to following the mysterious woman posing as his sister and gathering evidence until they were certain she was him.

When police finally descended on Tuğrul Başar’s home and arrested him, he was carrying his sister’s identity card, but a fingerprint test confirmed the fugitive’s identity. Although some sources only mention his impeccable disguise and feminine appearance, others claim that he had undergone a gender transition to achieve this drastic of a change. So far, neither version has been confirmed.

What is known is that Tuğrul Başar will serves his prison sentence in a men’s prison, regardless of how he identifies himself. Becausee he never officially updated his name or gender in Turkey’s civil registration system, he will be asigned according to the gender on his ID, regardless of his physical appearance or self-identification.

Qatar didn’t have the most impressive performance at this year’s Asian Volleyball Championship, losing all three games in its group stage against Thailand, Taipei, and South Korea, but it did stand out thanks to one of the most prolific scorers of the tournament – 13-year-old Mubarak Musa Thiik Madut, who scored 40 points in the three matches, more than any of his teammates.

Mubarak is not your typical 13-year-old boy. He is already 2.10 meters tall (6ft 11in), which makes him the tallest player on the Qatari volleyball team, but he also plays like a pro with many years of experience under his belt. In fact, he plays so well that many doubt he is only thirteen.

On his official player page, it says that Mubarak Musa Thiik Madut was born on November 24, 2012, in South Sudan, and was later naturalized by Qatar, which allowed him to compete for the Middle-Eastern country in official competitions.

In addition to playing for the Qatari national volleyball team, Mubarak has already won a bronze medal at the Asian U18 Beach Volleyball Championship, which only made his listed age that much harder to believe.

Being over two meters tall at such a young age is not unheard of, but what many sports experts have pointed out is Mubarak Musa Thiik Madut movement on the court and his obvious knowledge of the game. Most young teenagers move awkwardly, but Mubarak looks like he’s been playing for his entire life.

Some have speculated that, being born in Africa, where births frequently go unreported, Mubarak was probably just given a birth date at some point and everyone just went with it. However, this is just speculation, and Qatar’s Volleyball Federation has yet to comment on it.

At a recent hearing, Anthony Hall admitted to drink-driving, driving without a licence or insurance and taking his partner’s car without their consent. His lawyer told the judge that Hall had acted out of desperation, trying to escape a difficult personal situation, including relationship issues and financial problems. However, that did little to explain why a blind person would get behind the wheel of a vehicle and drive on the motorway while intoxicated.

Hall explained that he had decided to drive to Scotland to escape his woes after drinking four bottles of wine with his partner. Despite never having owned a driver’s license, he had worked around cars for most of his life, so he knew how to drive. The fact that he had lost his vision almost completely two years ago didn’t seem to dissuade him from his decision.

A police report mentioned that while driving on the M6 motorway, the blind man had even stopped at a gas station to refuel and was aided by the staff there, but no one reported his intoxicated state or obvious lack of vision.

In case you’re wondering how a blind man could drive 150 miles (241 kilometers) on a highway, at night, while drunk, you’re not the only one. Hall explained that he could still faintly see lights, so he just stayed behind a large truck, following its taillights. However, he had problems keeping his car steady, as police noticed him swerving between lanes and into the hard shoulder.

It’s nothing short of a miracle that Hall didn’t cause a car accident, but he was still sentenced to 36 weeks in prison, suspended for 18 months. He was also ordered to stay sober for 90 days and get into a rehabilitation program. We’d say he got off easy!

Videos of young men having their eyelashes cut or trimmed at barber shops or beauty salons started showing up on TikTok and other social media platforms last year, but instead of quickly fizzling out, they apparently turned into a global trend.

Associated by some with ‘looksmaxxing,’ eyelash trimming is not only bizarre, it’s downright dangerous, as it exposes the eyes to a lot of risks. Eyelashes are not purely cosmetic, they serve an important function – protecting your eyes from harm, so cutting them down to stubs can have serious health consequences.

Eyelashes prevent dirt and debris, including dead skin cells and sweat, as well as UV rays from entering the eye, and trimming them exposes people to infection, itchiness and frequent discomfort. Yes, they do grow back in time, but that takes months.

Potential infection and discomfort aside, the risk of damaging the eye during the trimming procedure should be enough to discourage people from shortening their eyelashes. Having sharp, fast moving metal blades so close to your eyes is extremely dangerous, and one wrong move could have disastrous consequences.

Although trimming eyelashes has been associated with masculinity among men, the reality is that there is no scientific merit to that concept. Eyelash length is a genetic inheritance, so it can occur in both men and women. The fact that long lashes are considered feminine is a purely cultural belief.

We have covered quite a few bizarre cosmetic trends over the years, from China’s “High Skull” skull reshaping procedure, to Thai women reshaping their lips into buffalo horns, but this one has to be one of the most unusual of them all.

In a video shot by a passer-by in the town of Ilfracombe, a couple of people can be seen climbing a traffic light post and damaging the equipment by cutting a bunch of wires connected to advanced sensors. After the vide went viral on social media, it was revealed that the pair – a couple of pensioners aged in their 60s and 70s – were part of a group of conspiracy theorists known as Blade Runners.

In a number of posts shared online, the so-called “Ilfracombe Blade Runners” dispute the idea that modern traffic lights are designed to make urban life better, and instead claim that they are “electronic assault weapons” powered by “illegal battlefield-derived technology” that poses an “imminent threat to life” by causing a range of serious health problems, including heart attacks, brain cancer, anxiety and even sudden death.

According to Devon and Cornwall Police, the man and woman caught on video tampering with traffic lights in Ilfracombe caused thousands of pounds’ worth of damage and were arrested on charges of criminal damage and causing danger to road users. They have since been released on bail.

The incident follows several reports of damaged traffic lights associated with wild conspiracy theories circulating online. The Blade Runners, for example, claim that the technology in traffic lights can “kill humans when focusing on a target,” without providing any kind of evidence.

Despite the criticism they have been facing from many on social media, the Blade Runners have stated that they will never back down, describing themselves as “not woke” but “fully awake”.

Qingyun Ladder elevator was a massive logistical achievement that made national and international headlines at the time of its inauguration. One could say that it became too popular for its own good, as tourists started flocking to the scenic area to ride it. It soon became blatantly obvious that the elevator capacity was insufficient to satisfy demand, with people sometimes waiting in lines for hours.

The children for whom the elevator was originally built could ride it free of charge, but they also had to wait their turn in line during busy periods. Luckily, the waiting period was recently cut in half thanks to the inauguration of a second panoramic elevator built right next to the first one. The new Fuyao Ladder elevator stands 288 metres, or about 945 feet, above the canyon floor, making it one of the most impressive outdoor elevators in the world.

The Fuyao elevator is faster and more spacious than the first one, while its shaft is 20 meters longer. The children it serves still have to take a shuttle to the outdoor elevator, then board a cable car, but they still reach their school in about 30 minutes, as opposed to the three hours it took them before. Not to mention the six-hour-long round trip.

“Before, I had to carry my things and walk for three hours on mountain roads to get to school, and if I wasn’t careful, I could easily slip and fall,” one student told Xinhua News.

Thanks to the twin elevators, one of the most tiring and dangerous journeys to school has now become one of the most exciting in the world.

“AI systems are made of multiple layers and never learned what a human is – they learned what humans statistically look like in millions of training images,” Simon Weckert, the shirt’s creator, explained. “In the early layers it’s edges, contrasts and texture gradients; deeper in the network it’s part-like patterns: the head-and-shoulders silhouette, the proportions of limbs against a torso, the continuity of a body’s outline against the background. A ‘person’, for the machine, is a bundle of visual statistics – and that is exactly its weakness.”

Photo: Simon Weckert

The Digital Camouflage shirt was carefully designed to confuse AI systems, making it very hard for them to recognize the wearer as a human being. Ironically, the pattern was created using AI, through a process known as an “adversarial loop”.

“The pattern was developed in an adversarial loop with the detection system itself: generate a candidate, show it to the detector, measure how confidently it still finds the person, adjust, repeat – until the confidence collapses,” Weckert told Dezeen Magazine. “This was necessary because a machine’s blind spots are not intuitive to humans; you cannot design against machine perception by eye, only the machine can tell you what it fails to see. There’s a poetic symmetry in that: the same class of AI that watches the square also taught the shirt how to hide.”

Photo: Simon Weckert

Although the colorful, almost hypnotic pattern of the Digital Camouflage shirt makes the wearer stand out like a sore thumb to other humans, to the AI systems tested by Weckert, it registers as nothing at all, least of all a person.

The unnamed man and his wife married in 2021 and moved in with his parents. They also owned a vacation home that they only visited during the holidays. In 2023, during one such visit, the man found a strange toothbrush, which raised suspicions about his wife’s fidelity. After checking the surveillance footage from the parking garage, he noticed a man who had previously driven his wife home from work.

When confronted, the man’s wife denied any wrongdoing, and he believed her. However, three months later, he accidentally discovered that she had indeed been having an affair. He had remotely activated the home’s robot vacuum cleaner via its mobile application to surprise his wife by talking to her through it, but he ended up catching her with her lover.

Upon activating the vacuum cleaner’s camera, the husband saw his wife in bed with the man he had seen on the surveillance camera. His instinct was to confront them immediately, but he kept his cool and decided to continue recording them as evidence in a subsequent lawsuit. The footage showed his wife embracing her lawyer and walking around the house naked while the man sat on the sofa.

Armed with video evidence, the scorned husband took his wife and her lover to court, demanding NT$2 million ($68,000) as compensation. The judges ruled that the man’s extramarital relationship surpassed the boundaries of friendship and ordered them to pay the cheated husband NT$500,000. Unfortunately, his success was shaded by a counter-lawsuit filed by his wife.

The video evidence captured with the robot vacuum cleaner may have helped the man prove his wife’s unfaithfulness, but it also proved that he had recorded the two lovers without their consent. He claimed that his actions were justified, but the court ruled that marital obligations do not supersede a person’s right to privacy, and he had no right to record his wife and her lover without their consent.

Under Taiwanese law, recording or disclosing another person’s private activities or information without informing them carried a sentence of up to three years in prison and a fine of up to 300,000 Taiwanese Dollars. In this particular case, the husband was sentenced to five months in jail and ordered to pay a fine of NT$150,000.

However, the main attraction of Unitree’s viral video is Superman running faster than Usain Bolt, the fastest human in history, reaching speeds of up to 12.66 m/s (45.6 km/h). Bolt, who became the first person to run the 100m in under 9.5 seconds, reached a top speed of 12.27 m/s (44.17 km/h).

Superman’s goofy running style doesn’t really do the humanoid robot justice, but if the figures reported by Unitree are real – they have yet to be verified by a third party – the humanoid robot revolution we are currently experiencing just got even scarrier. Just imagine being chased by one of these things and hearing its metal feet against the asphalt as it approaches…

This isn’t the first time Unitree goes viral with an impressive showcase. A few months back, it shocked the world with a synchronized martial arts performance executed to perfection by dozens of its humanoid robots, but it also sparked controversy when some of its robots started behaving erratically and actually hitting people. That hasn’t been the case with Superman, but imagine the world’s fastest humanoid robot behaving like that.