Unable to deal with the endless nagging of his wife any longer, a Chinese man felt the raging waters of the Yangtze River were an adequate substitute.



Zhou, a truck driver, and his wife were on a ferry when the man ran out with his hands placed firmly over his ears, shouting, “I can’t take it anymore!” Crew members on the ship initially felt he had injured his ears, though his predicament became far more apparent when his wife ran up to him and continued nagging.

After being questioned by the crew and finally pushed to the boiling point of his nagging wife, the man placed his hands over his ears in a gesture of defiance, said “I need a break,” and jumped over the railing and into the river.

Lighting the water, they searched for sign of the man but to no avail. Presumed dead, he surfaced 2 kilometers on the other side of the river, safe and sound.

The man was quoted as saying to the police, “I felt I was dying, but even that’s better than my wife’s nagging.” Zhou’s wife met up with her husband at the local police station, promising him to end the nagging, or at least when they’re on a boat.

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Lying about your age and beauty is par for the course when it comes to Internet dating. In China, such deceptions had deadly results for one lovesick teen who killed himself after a disappointing meeting with an Internet ‘hotty’ he had been chatting with.

The 17-year-old boy from the northeastern Heilongjiang province, whose name has not been released, chatted with what he thought was a 19-year-old girl for weeks on popular free Chinese instant messaging and chatroom service Tencent QQ.



The woman, who used the name Qunjiaofeiyang (meaning “Flying Skirt”) in chats with the boy, described herself as beautiful and the two had conversations online for weeks before deciding to meet in person. When they finally met in the nearby town of Mudanjiang, the woman turned out to be ten years the boy’s senior – and much less attractive than advertised.

Disappointed and depressed, the teen returned home immediately and discontinued eating and sleeping. He made the tragic choice to end his life through hanging himself four days later.

The teen is just one of many in China, which has one of the world’s highest suicide rates.

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What’s green, juicy, and sweet, and improves your karma? You’ll never guess!

For centuries, statues of a sitting, big-bellied Buddha have illustrated what’s commonly called a “pear-shaped” physique. Now a Chinese farmer has turned the tables: Instead of a pear-shaped Buddha, he has given us a Buddha-shaped pear.



The technique, which took Gao Xianzhang six years to perfect, involves confining each piece of fruit in a plastic mold for a certain amount of time as it grows. There are no reports on the flavor just yet, but that’s presumably not much of a priority.

The response to the unusual fruit, at least in Gao’s Hebei province locale, suggests that he’s struck gold with his concept. Whether for superstitious reasons or just novelty value, people have been snatching up the pears, even at a price of about $10 apiece.

Now Gao hopes the rest of the world will catch on too. His next crop is expected to be some 10,000 pears, and he plans to start shipping them to Europe.

It all makes you wonder what fruit might look like once farmers across China begin to adopt Mr. Gao’s process. Will your average shopper come home someday with a bag full of BMW-shaped pears, or cheeseburger-shaped apples? Can the day of the Michael Jackson kumquat be far off?

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Primates of the human variety like many different types of music – from classical to rap to country to rock- but monkeys are a little pickier. Researchers in Bejing have recently found that monkeys were calmed by heavy metal while ignoring other kinds of music.



Several different samples of music, including Led Zeppelin, Miles Davis and Bach, were played for a group of cotton-top tamarin monkeys, but the testees were disinterested in all of them.

However, when researchers put on Metallica’s “Master of Puppets”, the monkeys responded positively and placidly – unlike most parents of metalheads and counter to the hypothesis of the scientists, who anticipated that the heavy metal track would agitate the primates.



While the Tamarins enjoyed Metallica, they were far more interested in tunes composed specifically for them by cellist David Teie. They also displayed strong reactions to melodies composed of calls of monkeys; the sample group responded with increased anxiety levels to music composed of distressed Tamarin calls, and were calmed by the long calls that signify happiness in their species.

“Monkeys interpret rising and falling tones differently than humans. Oddly, their only response to several samples of human music was a calming response to the heavy-metal band Metallica,” said lead researcher Charles Snowdon. “If we understand how we can affect their emotional states through using musical tones and aspects of our speech, maybe those of us living with companion animals can have a better relationship with them, too.”

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A two-headed cobra has been born in China. Such anomalies among snakes are rare but they do happen. As far as anyone knows, this is the first incidence of such an occurrence with a cobra.



The owner of the snake is one Mr. Liu, a railroad worker who breeds snakes as a hobby. He bought 10 snake eggs to hatch at his home in Jiangxi province in eastern China.

He got the surprise of his life when he first saw the reptile, which is able to eat out of both sides of its mouth simultaneously.

“When the cobras hatched out, one of them had two heads. The cobra is able to eat using both of its mouths…Its four eyes were cloudy at birth, but that will change when the snake sheds its skin for the first time,” said Liu.

Snakes born two heads have been known to live up to 20 years in captivity, and Thelma and Louise, a two-headed snake that lived at the San Diego Zoo in California, had 15 offspring during her lifetime. Still, these snakes have many difficulties, and two heads aren’t better than one in this instance.



The major problem with this anomaly is that both snake heads have to decide they are hungry at the same time, and then they have to agree to pursue the same prey. Then they might fight over which head gets to swallow the prey.

To make matters even more complicated, since snakes operate by smell, if one head catches the scent of prey on the other’s head, it may attack and try to swallow its second head!

Snakes with two heads occur in the same way Siamese twins are born to humans. A developing embryo starts out normally as it begins to split into identical twins, but then for some unknown reason that process is interrupted part way, leaving the twins joined. Variations occur at the point the embryo ceases to separate, and snakes, just like Siamese twins, can be joined at the breast, hip or head.





A spokesman for the local wild animal protection centre said the two-headed snake was most likely the result of genetic mutation.



Mother Nature is a trickster, no?

What do YOU think about this?

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In an effort to develop treatments for human genetic diseases, South Korean scientists have manipulated the fluorescent protein gene in a cloning process that has left three cloned cats with a rather weird side effect: They Glow when exposed to ultraviolet beams.



“The ability to produce cloned cats with the manipulated genes is significant as it could be used for developing treatments for genetic diseases and for reproducing model (cloned) animals suffering from the same diseases as humans,” the Ministry of Science and Technology said in a statement.

Cats have some 250 different genetic diseases that are similar to humans, so there is great potential in finding cures to various genetic problems.



This is a huge breakthrough for South Korea. They suffered some setbacks last year, after experiments the cloning expert Hwang Woo-Suk conducted, turned out to be fake.

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If you’ve liked watching Lt. Commander Data, the positronic-brained second officer, in the sci-fi series Star Trek, then you’d love to hear this.

The South Korean government plans to build two robot-themed parks close to Seoul, one in the bustling seaport of Incheon, and another in Masan by the year 2013.



The megaproject, the first of its kind on the planet, is estimated to cost a whopping $1.6 billion, and will feature an array of robotic marvels allowing visitors to interact with tomorrow’s machines.

According to reports published on the web site Korea.net, the two cities are being developed as futuristic hubs, poised to become the country’s Silicon Valley of robotics.

Robotics is considered to be one of South Korea’s booming industries and it has grown by leaps and bounds over the past five years, recording a 40 percent jump since the year 2003, the site reported.

To ensure that the robotics sector continues to see such growth rates, recently, the government drew up what is known as the Robot Ethics Code, a code of ethics that will prevent android abuse by humans as well as the other way round.

It’s basically a how-to manual for both robot-makers and robot-users that tells them how to relate to robots.



Given that the government aims to install a robot in every household by the year 2020, perhaps, that isn’ such a quixotic idea.

What’s more, in a recently-out book titled “Love and Sex with Robots“, a British Artificial Intelligence researcher David Levy, predicts that robots will advance to such phenomenal levels in the coming years that it’ll be possible for humans to even marry them by 2050.

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Yoo Ye-eun, a 5 year-old South Korean girl is being talked about as though she might be the next Mozart.



Ye-eun was born without eyes and was abandoned by her parents.

She has never received formal piano lessons, yet even at the age of 3, she could play any song she heard after listening to it a single time.

The blind pianist received a large amount of recognition after a video of her performance received more than 27 million views on a popular Korean website called Pandora TV.

A similar clip on YouTube had received two million hits before it was removed.






‘She has perfect pitch even though she has never learnt to play. We never taught her,’ said Ye-eun’s adoptive mother, Park Jung Soon.

In May she performed a duet of ‘You Raise me Up’ with 7 year-old British singer Connie Talbot, who last year starred in reality show Britain’s Got Talent.

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Hang Mioku, who had her first plastic surgery at the age of 28, is a cosmetic surgery addict who has let her obsession with surgeries ruin her life.



After her first plastic surgery, her addiction led her to Japan where she received additional operations on her face, which eventually became enlarged and deformed.

Eventually the surgeons she was visiting told her that they would no longer perform operations on her and suggested she seek help for her addiction.

Upon, returning home to Korea, Mioku was so deformed that her own family could no longer recognize her.



After searching for someone who would perform more surgeries on here, she found a local Korean doctor who provided her with silicone, which she would self inject into her face with a needle.

Mioku was so addicted to plastic surgery, she would even inject cooking oil into her face when the silicone supply ran out.

Recently, Mioku was featured on a Korean TV show for her addiction and deformities. Many viewers sent in money to help her get additional surgeries to help reduce the size of her face.



Having seen the error in her decisions, Mioku only wishes she could go back and have her original face back.

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The hybrid descendants of a carp and a leather carp (tangerine fish) are the new sensation in the small South Korean town of Chongju because of their "humanoid" facial features.

The look suddenly appears after observing the front part of their heads for a moment or two. Two lines and two dots on their heads bear some resemblance to human eyes.



The local newspapers managed to snap some sensational pictures of the fish, which are about 80 centimeters long (more than three feet) and 50 centimeters (almost two feet) in circumference.

The fish live in a pond behind the home of a 64-year old South Korean man and have been there since 1986, although they have never attracted such public attention before.

“My fish have been getting more and more human for the past couple of years, said the owner of the unusual fish species.

The two fish are females so it will not be possible for them to breed others of their very odd ilk. They remain two very weird members of a very dynamic and eerie cosmos.

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