“I gave birth,” “I’m fed up with them,” “They made me feel unattractive,” “My body hurts,” or simply “I want to at least get some of the money from the surgery back,” are some of the reasons listed by Russian women selling their breast implants online. But while most of these reasons explain why the women decided to have them removed, only one of them explains why they are selling them, which has led some analysts to suggest that the bizarre trend can be connected to Russia’s current economic woes.

Fluctuating exchange rates, declining purchasing power, the withdrawal of Western banks and large companies from the Russian market, and the current fuel scarcity have all had some effect on all but the richest of Russians, and some are trying to make ends meet by selling whatever prized possessions they still own. More worrying still is the fact that some of the sellers come from affluent parts of Russia, like Sankt Petersburg or Moscow.

The BAZA Telegram channel reports that high-end used breast implants are being sold online for three or four times less than their original cost. For example, Mentor implants, originally priced at 140,000 rubles ($1,820), are being sold for 35,000 rubles ($455), while Motiva implants, originally priced at around 200,000 rubles ($2,600), are listed for 30,000 rubles ($390).

But just in case that kind of bargain sounds too good to be true, you should know that probably no surgeon would agree to work with a used silicone implant. After removal, they retain a lot of biomaterial from the original owner, and the material’s properties make it impossible to boil the implant or clean it properly with formalin.

Experts warn that using another person’s implants could lead to tissue necrosis, or even death, as there is a high likelihood that your immune system will reject an implant featuring another person’s biomaterial. You can still buy one as a souvenir, if you really want to!

Dubbed “rooftop rain,” the innovative urban cooling system has reportedly been implemented in Yuncheng, a city in northern China’s Shanxi Province, where several high-rise apartment buildings were fitted with rooftop misting systems that spray a fine mist of water into the air. This allegedly helps lower the temperature around the building by up to 8 degrees Celsius.

The rooftop rain system is based on a scientific principle called evaporative cooling. The high-pressure nozzles on top of the apartment buildings spray extremely fine droplets of water into the air, and as these droplets evaporate, they absorb heat from the surrounding air, cooling it, in a way that isn’t too different from how sweat cools down our bodies.

It’s important to note that the system is designed for very hot days, as the water sprayed from the top of the buildings needs to evaporate in contact with the hot air, instead of pouring down like rain on passers-by below. So maybe “rooftop mist” would have made a lot more sense.

This intriguing cooling system recently went viral on platforms like Reddit and Instagram, leaving millions of people wondering why it isn’t used on a wider scale, especially considering the heat wave ravaging Europe and North America right now. It’s a legitimate question, but there are a few things to consider.

While it does look (and probably feels) cool, the rooftop rain system is still a bit of an enigma. No one really knows how effective and efficient it really is. How much water does it require in order to cool the air on a large scale? Do the spray nozzles get clogged up by mineral deposits? What about the indoor temperatures in these buildings, does it drop significantly as well?

There are still a lot of things we don’t know, but China has reportedly installed rooftop rain systems in several cities, so there must be something to it.

Nancy Nápoles was quickly found on a deserted road after she asked passers-by to call her husband, but this was not the end of the story, but rather the beginning of a nationwide scandal involving embezzled municipal funds, political intrigue and fake-kidnapping allegations.

Mexican investigators spent the last three months searching for the three kidnappers and trying to figure out how they pulled off their daring plan. After questioning the victim, her family, and the kidnappers, who were eventually captured by police, investigators started noticing a number of inconsistencies.

Nápoles herself told police that the kidnappers threatened to kill her and her family if she didn’t cooperate. She claimed that they asked her to pay “40 million pesos in exchange for her freedom” and even advised her to “take it from the city council’s resources,” if she didn’t have the money. She added that she took advantage of her captors’ carelessness to escape.

That was an unusual piece of advice from the kidnappers, but investigators soon learned that the mayor’s husband and brother were the ones who contacted the kidnappers and paid them to stage her abduction. Their alleged plan was to “pay” the 40 million pesos ($2.3 million) ransom from municipal funds to cover up an embezzlement scheme that Nápoles herself had allegedly orchestrated.

The kidnappers’ testimonies make up the main arguments of the prosecution in this case, but they are backed up by other cold, hard facts. The mayor’s husband and her brother had allegedly been in contact with the kidnappers around 150 times before Nápoles’ abduction, and they are now missing and presumed fugitives. During one of these phone calls, Nápoles’ husband offers the kidnappers $28,000 to pull off the job.

Nancy Nápoles continues to deny any wrongdoing and insists that this is all part of a conspiracy to ruin her political career. She was summoned to testify in this controversial case on July 9th, but no charges have been brought against her yet.

“I categorically deny it,” Nápoles recently told reporters. “There is no such thing, as the municipality is financially sound.”

If found guilty, Nápoles and her accomplices risk spending up to 16 years behind bars.

The new Uworld U1 androids (male and female) are 183 and 169 cm tall, respectively, and weigh about half as much as their average human counterparts. Apart from biomimetic skin that looks and feels real, UBTECH’s robots also feature a dual-pivot biomimetic cervical spine that enables them to reproduce up to 90 percent of fundamental human movements.

The Chinese company’s proprietary facial expression actuation system allegedly synchronizes speech and lip movements with less than 20 milliseconds of latency. The humanoid robots are powered by the world’s first emotion-aware LLM designed for long-term companionship, which is capable of recognizing more than 20 fine-grained emotional states with an accuracy rate exceeding 90%.

“The U1 Series is designed to support a wide range of consumer and commercial applications, including daily companionship, emotional support, lifestyle enhancement, and social assistance, as well as reception and hospitality services, elder care, psychological support, tourism and exhibitions, research and education, and premium domestic service applications,” a UBTECH press release reads.

Following the unveiling of its U1 humanoid robots, UBTECH announced that it has already received over 10,000 orders. Prices reportedly range between $17,000 to $145,000, depending on built-in features. The first robots are expected to be delivered in mid-September.

South Korean news media recently revealed that a branch manager of a Saemaul Credit Union in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang Province, confessed to taking considerable amounts of money from the bank vault and trying to cover up his actions by replacing the banknotes with fake bills. But what really attracted people’s attention was the funny-looking bills he used.

Photos and videos of the play money used in the embezzlement scheme went viral on social media, inspiring a variety of funny comments from flabbergasted netizens. The photos showed cartoonish replicas of 50,000-won banknotes featuring cartoon animals like ducks and bears.

The obviously fake bills could be spotted from a mile away, but the bank manager, whose identity has not been revealed, allegedly took advantage of the fact that no one actually checked the vault. Chosun Daily reported that this was a very small bank branch with very few employees and that the manager made sure that he was the one depositing the money in the vault every day.

When he went into the vault, the manager swapped some of the real bills with the play money he had allegedly ordered online. It’s unclear how long the man’s embezzlement scheme lasted, but at one point, another employee reported his unusual behavior to the higher-ups, and the Saemaul Credit Union launched an investigation.

It didn’t take long for the investigators to figure out what the man had done, but according to reports, the bank failed to immediately alert the authorities, opting to solve its problems internally. In a press release, Saemaul Credit Union stated that it had fired the bank manager responsible in this case, adding that he had returned the stolen money and that the bank considers the matter closed.

On October 4, 1847, when Edward Francis, a wine merchant from Port Louis, the capital of the British colony of Mauritius, informed his partners in Bordeaux that he had received the 48 barrels of wine they had sent and had already sold almost a third of them, he purchased two stamps that were worth literally pennies back then. Now, they are worth millions!

The Mauritius Blue is one of the most famous postage stamps in the world and considerably more expensive than its cousin, the Mauritius Pink. The Bordeaux Letter features original copies of both, which makes it the most expensive letter in the world, with an estimated selling price of over $5 million.

The infamous Mauritius postage stamps were mistakenly created in 1847 by an engraver who added “Post Office” next to Queen Victoria’s profile, rather than “Post Paid.” 500 copies were made and sold before the mistake was rectified. Today, only 27 copies are left (12 blue and 15 pink), and they are treated as mythical treasures by philatelists.

Clean “Mauritius Blue ” stamps, free of postal stamps, are valued at 10-15 million euros ($11.4 – $17 million), but they are so revered by philatelists that they rarely exchange hands. The Bordeau Letter, for example, was auctioned in 1993 and has been in the possession of the same mysterious Singaporean collector ever since.

Professor Hirotaka Sato and his team originally demonstrated that Madagascar hissing cockroaches could be remotely controlled by installing electrodes on their sensory organs. This turned them into drones that could be used in a variety of scenarios, like scouring disaster zones for survivors. There was only one problem – the bugs didn’t handle water well at all, which limited their usefulness in flooded areas.

Photo: Hirotaka Sato et al.

To overcome the cockroach’s natural limitation, researchers started working on a 3D-printed diving suit that could provide the wearer with breathable air for an extended period of time. They came up with a resin diving suit that generates oxygen and supplies it to the cockroach’s spiracles, allowing it to operate underwater for up to three hours.

The diving suit developed by Hato and his team doesn’t come with a conventional oxygen tank; it features a mix of hydrogen peroxide and manganese dioxide, which react to produce absorbable oxygen. The diving suit worked flawlessly in tests, allowing cockroaches to move underwater at speeds of up to 78.4 millimeters per second, only 10 mm less than their average speed on land.

Photo: Hirotaka Sato et al.

“By expanding the operational parameters of our cyborg insects to include underwater movement, we believe they can enhance search and rescue operations,” Hirotaka Sato wrote in a paper he and his team recently published in the journal “Nature Communications“.

The cyborg insect developed by Professor Sato’s team played an active role in ‘Operation Lionheart,’ an actual search and rescue operation during the magnitude 7.7 earthquake that struck Myanmar in the spring of 2025, but the team has more ambitious goals in mind. They dream of using their diving-suit-wearing bugs to one day help explore the surface of Mars.

Pets, and pet dogs especially, are known to have major benefits on humans’ mood and general well-being, but not everyone is willing to accept the responsibilities of caring for an animal. Now, people who don’t want their own pets can just rent them by the hour and enjoy their company for as long as they want, without having to bother about the animals’ needs.

The pet sharing platform ‘Wangfu’ launched its dog rental service via social media last March and is already operating in major Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen. People seem to love how simple it is to use for both dog owners and those looking to rent the animals.

All dog owners have to do is register on the platform and upload their dog’s information and pictures, while those looking to walk a dog for an hour or two need to select the desired dog and request a walk. According to Chinese news sources, the fee ranges from 10 to 60 yuan ($1.5 to $9).

There are a few rules that Wangfu users must abide by. The pickup and return of the dog are agreed upon directly between the owner and the user. Walks are limited to areas familiar to the dog, and the platform provides real-time location tracking. If the animal starts behaving strangely in any way, the renter has to notify the owner immediately.

Both parties must undergo real-name verification, and Wangfu takes out pet insurance for the animals on the platform, in case anything goes wrong.

The service has been getting a lot of attention in China lately, but so far, feedback has been split. While some believe that renting out other people’s pets increases the chance of adopting a dog, others point out that the “repeated changes in human companions, environments, and daily routines can cause unnecessary emotional stress to dogs”. Plus, the ethics of renting out beloved pets for financial reasons have also been called into question.

Each household was tasked with hand-carving a section of the 1.2-kilometer road. Construction equipment would never have fit in the narrow space, and the roughly 80 people involved in this monumental endeavour couldn’t afford it anyway, so all the work was done primarily with chisels and hammers.

It took the people of Lanying village nearly four years to finish the rough foundation of what would become Lanying Cliff Road, but it was only in 2016 that Chongqing regional authorities decided to approve the reinforcement and widening of the rudimentary road, justifying its role in alleviating poverty in the area.

Extremely narrow and steep, with the gradient hitting 22.9% in some sections, the Lanying Cliff Road requires skill and patience to navigate safely, but those brave enough to try it are treated to spectacular views of Lanying Grand Canyon, the deepest canyon in Chongqing.

Looking for more impressive Chinese mountain roads? Check out the Daobeiliang Sky Road in Shizu, or the Guizhou Lu’an Expressway, which passes through shaved-off mountain peaks.

The mysterious ‘Batman’ started operating in Lagos de Moreno in mid-June. The first person was found duct-taped to a lamp post, with ‘thief’ written on his forehead, on June 13th. An allegedly stolen motorcycle was also found nearby, suggesting that the immobilized person was a thief. But this was only the beginning, as police have since discovered at least 4 other alleged thieves tied to lamp posts.

Although most people seem convinced this crusade against alleged motorcycle thieves is the work of a single vigilante, local authorities told news reporters that this might be the work of a gang of vigilantes. Interestingly, so far, the victims have not provided any clarification in that regard.

Jalisco’s Secretary of Public Security, Juan Pablo Hernández, reported that investigations are underway to clarify the attacks and locate those involved. He also emphasized that the five men found bound so far are currently being treated as victims, adding that no one should take the law into their own hands, regardless of their motives.

The mysterious Batman of Lagos de Moreno has sparked controversy on Mexican social media, dividing those who condemn this type of vigilante justice and those who express support for the alleged perpetrator.

Back in 2018, we reported a very similar case in the Mexican city of Puerto Vallarta, where at least 11 people were found completely stripped of their clothes, tied to lamp posts, and with the letter ‘R’ shaved on the back of their heads. The mystery was never solved.