China’s state-owned television network CCTV reports that roughly 95% of the 128,000 micro-dramas launched in the first quarter of this year were AI-generated. Only a fraction of them achieved massive success, but they are so cheap to make these days that even a single hit can cover the costs of thousands of ‘duds’ and still turn a profit.

There is just one big problem with AI-generated short dramas – image rights. Following multiple high-profile cases of ‘face theft’, where AI reportedly copied the facial features of real actors without their consent, Chinese companies are now scrambling to secure the rights to real human faces to be used in AI-generated content for a given period of time.

An actress using the pseudonym Lin Min recently received a message from a short drama director offering to buy the right to use her image for a year for 500 yuan ($75). She refused, considering the offer too low, but her post went viral on social media and eventually revealed a trend. Agencies are currently paying between 500 and 1,500 yuan for the right to legally use people’s faces in AI-generated show dramas.

Li Xin (pseudonym), an employee of an AI short drama company in Hangzhou, told Chao News that most of those currently selling their image are students, community aunties, extras, or even mid-level actors, because “big stars would never sign an image licensing agreement.”

Film director Chen Shi explained that a short drama might only have five or six main actors, but it requires a dozen or even twenty supporting roles. Because generative AI models tend to “steal” real people’s faces, companies now prefer to secure the rights of actual individuals to avoid legal troubles.

Offers and contract conditions vary, with some companies paying higher fees for exclusive rights to people’s physical image, and others paying smaller sums but allowing collaborators to sell their faces to other short drama producers, if they so desire.

Short drama companies have also been trying to lower production costs by creating their own AI actors, which also sparked controversy in China a while back.

The base of this peculiar treat is a rich, milky soft serve, topped with fresh oysters from Yamada Bay in Iwate Prefecture, and finally drizzled with a special soy sauce. Not the most appetizing description, we know, but the combination of “seafood freshness + sweet milk + salty soy sauce” is sure to shock your taste buds, at least.

As photos and clips of people enjoying the oyster-infused soft-serve ice cream started showing up on social media, people couldn’t contain their surprise, with many declaring themselves convinced that the dessert was created by AI and not a real thing.

“This has gone beyond the realm of desserts!” one person commented on X.

“The ‘creativity’ of the Japanese knows no bounds!” someone else wrote.

Michino-eki Yamada is expected to continue serving their unique oyster-infused soft serve ice cream all through the summer, so head on over for what is bound to be one of the strangest gastronomical experiences of your life. One cone will set you back just 600 yen ($3.7), so at least you won’t be breaking the bank.

Japan’s fascination with soft-serve ice cream has led to the creation of other unusual treats, like this hard-to-swallow matcha-covered dessert, or this soft-serve cone swimming in a bowl of ramen.

In the early and mid 1900s, gender-segregated beaches were nothing special. They were designed to preserve women’s modesty, allowing them to wear more skimpy bathing suits without attracting attention, but as such social norms faded into obscurity, gender-segregated beaches literally tore down the barriers separating men and women; all except one, Trieste’s Pedocin Beach.

Photo: Google Earth

The wall dividing the sexes on Pedocin extends into the shallow waters of the Adriatic Sea, beyond which men and women can fraternize freely, if they so desire. However, the pebbled beach area is off-limits for the opposite sex, with local authorities operating separate entries and charging 1.20 euros ($1.4) per person.

Although El Pedocin is considered by most locals to be an important part of the local history and culture, the segregated beach does occasionally spark controversy. For example, earlier this month, the beach made international news headlines after a woman got into a heated argument with the men after making her way onto their side of the beach.

“You’re a bunch of sexist oafs. This is a form of discrimination. Shame on you,” the trespassing woman allegedly shouted at the men trying to escort her back to the women’s side. According to some sources, the woman was only trying to help her husband get their disabled son undressed before returning to the women’s side of the beach, but that didn’t matter too much to the other men.

The woman was escorted out before the argument could escalate into a brawl, but the incident sparked a heated debate around the idea of a gender-degregated beach in 21st century Europe. While some consider the mere idea medieval, locals seem very fond of El Pedocin and its concrete wall.

“It’s not from the Middle Ages! It’s part of the history of Trieste. No Triestino wants to remove that wall!” one local woman wrote on X.

“Pedocin is part of Trieste’s traditions. Now it’s a victim of cancel culture,” another local defended El Pedocin.

Photo: Municipality of Trieste

When used correctly, massage guns can relieve pain, improve blood flow, and promote relaxation, but their effect on the eyes is demonstrably damaging, as a team of doctors showed in a case study published in the BMJ Case Reports journal. The patient, a young man from Edinburgh, Scotland, admitted to using a massage gun to relax his eyes for several weeks, which resulted in several deep retinal tears.

Doctors Niamh O’Connell ‍‍and Ashraf Khan were shocked when the unnamed patient showed up at an eye treatment center in the Scottish capital, because both of his eyes were in terrible shape. His right eye had multiple retinal tears, widespread retinal bruising, and a condition called retinal dialysis, while the left eye also had significant retinal bruising and six small horseshoe tears.

Strangely enough, the man had no personal or family history of ocular disorders and had denied any previous head injury or trauma. He wore glasses for short-sightedness, with a prescription of −2.00 in the right and −2.25 in the left, but that was in no way connected to the lesions on his eyeballs.

Photo: Colin Lloyd/Unsplash

Left without a real explanation, the doctors asked the patient about anything “untoward involving the eyes,” and that was when he reluctantly told them that he had been using a percussive massage gun both around and directly on both eyes, on a weekly basis, for around three months. He hadn’t noticed anything unusual until a few days prior to his visit to the eye treatment center, when he started seeing floaters and flashing lights in his right eye.

Because the patient had no other risk factors for retinal pathology, the doctors concluded that the percussive massage gun was responsible for his serious eye trauma, adding that this was the first documented case of retinal dialysis with multiple bilateral retinal tears.

The young patient reportedly used the massage gun on his eyes to relieve the feeling of tiredness, but the percussive action had unintended consequences. The massage gun is believed to have rapidly compressed the eyeballs back, causing them to squish out from the sides, leading to retinal dialysis.

At 6 months after his diagnosis was set, the patient’s ocular status was stable without progression of the retinal dialysis or presence of cataracts.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first case of massage gun use causing severe visual impairment. A couple of years ago, we wrote about a 42-year-old Chinese man who used a massage gun on his eyes only to develop cataracts and suffer lens dislocation.

Featured image: Naipo/Unsplah

Seen from above, it looks as if the smaller house is “trapped” inside the walls of a larger, unfinished palace, and according to the local legend, that is more or less the situation. No one knows exactly how the House in a House came to be anymore, but if the most popular story is to be believed, it started as a ‘nail house‘ whose stubborn owner refused to sell.

Photo: BolCroatia.com

Legend has it that, at the end of the 19th century, the respectable and wealthy maritime family Vuković decided to build a grandiose residence in Bol. They started buying land in town, offering above-market prices for each plot, so locals were more than happy to part with their properties; all except Marko, who went by the nickname ‘Sila’.

Despite the best efforts of the Vuković family to convince Marko to sell his house, he stuck to his decision, so the wealthy family decided to force him out. They started building their palace right around Sila’s house, only a few meters away from it, in fact, hoping that the claustrophobic feeling would get him to sell eventually.

Tragedy struck when the three Vuković brothers perished at sea while traveling to buy the materials needed to complete the building. The project was abandoned, but Marko Sila allegedly continued living inside his house within a house for the rest of his life.

It’s impossible to know just how accurate the legend of the House in a House is, but one thing is for sure – the architectural oddity is now one of the main attractions of Brac Island, and a symbol of the resilience of ‘the little guy’.

According to Gurjar, the incident took place late at night when she and her family were asleep inside their home in Madhya Pradesh’s Shivpuri district. Several unidentified men cut the fencing around the property and made their way inside the house, where they proceeded to lock the door to the room where the family was sleeping.

The Indian influencer claims that she and her husband realized something was wrong at around 4 am, when one of them woke up and noticed that the door was closed. They tried opening it, but it was locked, so they panicked and phoned some neighboring relatives to get them out of the room.

When they were finally free, Rachna and her husband found obvious signs of a burglary, including ravaged storage spaces, missing jewelry, cash, and even a carton of energy drinks. Police have launched an investigation, but the suspects have yet to be identified.

“They locked us inside the room and then committed the burglary. They took away gold, silver jewellery, cash, and a carton of energy drink, worth around Rs 8 lakh to Rs 10 lakh ($8,000 – $10,500). They also changed the angles of the CCTV cameras, possibly with a lathi (bamboo cane), so that their faces were not recorded,” Gurjar said.

The Police have launched an investigation into this case, and one of their main leads is Rachna Gurjar’s social media activity. She had recently recorded clips from inside her home, showing off her jewelry and wads of cash to her nearly 100,000 social media followers, and investigators believe this may have made her a target for burglars.

While the police are trying to identify the masked men seen in the CCTV footage captured by Rachna’s surveillance cameras, the incident has sparked a heated debate online regarding the risks of displaying wealth and home interiors on social media.

The life-size Sadair’s Spear is nothing short of a technical wonder. It took a team of LEGO builders no less than 9,400 hours to put together and turned out so incredibly realistic that, in motion, it reads as a real Koenigsegg rather than a plastic brick sculpture.

“This was the most complex build in the least amount of time of all the Lego Technic cars,” LEGO’s design lead Lubor Zelinka told Top Gear. “The brief called for a Lego Technic vehicle that could go very fast, so we set a target of 100kph (62mph). We started talking about it last summer, but we didn’t really begin work until October. The whole project was seven and a half months. The other ask was to incorporate Koenigsegg’s famous Ghost Mode, so this is the first time we have had so many opening body panels on a full-size build. It’s not just a model anymore, it’s a vehicle.”

The entire car weighs about 1,800 kilograms (4,000 pounds), 400 kilograms (881 pounds) of which are plastic LEGO elements. Underneath the intricate LEGO body are a bespoke metal chassis, an FIA-spec roll cage, Koenigsegg carbon wheels, and a proper suspension system. Unlike the real Sadair’s Spear, the LEGO vehicle is powered by a small electric motor that proved powerful enough to push the car to 111 km/h.

“Our ambition was to create the most advanced LEGO Technic build we’ve ever produced. This set really embodies the philosophy of LEGO Technic, Build For Real,” senior model designer Kasper Rene Hansen told Autonext.

According to popular Telegram news channel BAZA, the sale of so-called ‘fuel tabs’ has increased 2.5 times in the last month, a stat confirmed by an increase in social media posts featuring the controversial products. Sold under brands like Buqa or B-ECO, these fuel tabs allegedly improve combustion efficiency and stabilize combustion in internal combustion engines, thereby reducing fuel consumption.

The miraculous tablets can be bought from most gas stations for prices ranging between 50 and 80 rubles ($0.7 and $1.1). One tablet works for up to 200 liters of gasoline, with some brands claiming that it can even turn the inferior AI-92 gasoline into standard AI-95.

It’s unclear how the pills actually work, but experts warn that the additional additives in them might react to those already present in the fuel, causing injector problems or other engine issues. Many also believe that these pills are nothing more than an “engine placebo” designed only to part desperate motorists from their hard-earned money.

Schaubach’s idea was simple – come up with a type of armor that could protect the sheep from wolf bites while allowing it to move around and feed freely. He came up with a light plastic net covered in sharp spikes that he claims would cause enough pain to the wolf to discourage it from taking another bite.

“A wolf is an intelligent animal, I don’t believe it would try to bite a sheep a second time,” the inventor told Austrian reporters.

However, the reactions from the general public and sheep farmers were mostly negative. Most of them called the chain mail both impractical from the point of view of overall costs, as well as inefficient in stopping wolf attacks.

René Krüger from the town of Wersbe, who keeps about 1,000 sheep, rejected Schaubach’s idea as “impractical” and “harmful” for the animal. He warned that the sheep’s wool could become entangled in the mesh over time, and that wolves, instead of giving up, would eventually change tactics and attack exposed body parts such as the legs or the head.

Gina Strampe, from the Association for Agricultural Cultivation of Lower Saxony, also expressed skepticism about Rudolf Schaubach’s sheep chain mail, claiming that it wasn’t a financially sustainable solution, because no one could afford to dress hundreds, even thousands of animals in the plastic mesh.

Rudolf Schaubach has so far dismissed all criticism, claiming that people only judged his sheep chain mail after watching photos of it, instead of giving it a try. Although he himself has yet to test it in real-life conditions, to see how it performs in case of a wolf attack, he did put it on sheep, and claims that one sheep wore the protective net for several days without any problems, moving and eating normally.

Following the growing controversy around his sheep chain mail, Schaubach has stopped testing his invention in Austria and is currently seeking it opportunities to test some pleace else for now.

Fishing rods and bait will be provided on site, and the underwater action will also be visible on a large screen, thanks to cameras installed in the pond. It’s not yet clear if this is designed as a veritable attraction for diehard fishermen, or just as a form of entertainment for men as they wait for their better halves to finish shopping.

According to the project’s creators, the world’s first indoor fishing pond will be a “nature island” inside the shopping center. Fishing will take place to the sounds of birdsong and frog croaking, to create a relaxing, peaceful atmosphere.

It’s unclear when the indoor pond will open, or how much it will cost to fish there, but sources speculate that it might even be free, because no one is allowed to haul any of the fish they catch. They have to throw them back into the pond, but they will be awarded points that they can spend on various goods in the shopping center.

The seemingly humane approach hasn’t really impressed activists, and for good reason. Hooking fish from morning until evening, every day, seven days a week, sounds more like torture for the fish.