Biotech Company Wants to Bring Brain-Dead People Back to Life

Bioquark, a biotechnolgy company from Philadelphia believes brain death is not as irreversible as most people think, and claims to have come up with a series of injections capable of “resetting” the brain, essentially bringing patients back to life.

Up until a few years ago, a person was declared dead when their heart stopped beating and they were no longer breathing. But then we came up with advanced medical technology capable of pumping oxygen into the body and keeping major organs in working condition. All but one, the brain. Today, most countries define death as the permanent loss of brain stem function. Once someone suffers complete and irreversible loss of brain function, they are officially declared dead. But one company wants to prove that brain death isn’t the end.

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31-Year-Old Becomes First Person to Climb Yosemite’s El Capitan with No Ropes

Alex Honnold, a 31-year-old mountain climber from Northern California, recently became the first person ever to climb the 3,000-foot high El Capitan granite wall in Yosemite National Park, without any ropes or other safety equipment.

Hannold pulled-off the historic, death-defying “free solo” climb on Saturday, June 4th, reaching the top of El Capitan in just 3 hours and 56 minutes. All he used as gear was a bag of chalk powder to improve his grip on the slippery granite. To make his job a little easier, the young climber climbed the wall several times before, using ropes, and marked every toe and finger-hold he would use during his free climb, with chalk. Even so, the challenge was monumental, and his success prompted Alpinist Magazine to write “This is indisputably the greatest free solo of all time.”

 

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Man Loses 32 Pounds Eating Only Ice Cream for 100 Days

Anthony Howard-Crow, a 32-year-old stunt dieter and YouTuber from Loveland, Colorado, recently underwent an unusual diet in order to prove that you can eat pretty much anything and still lose weight as long as you keep an eye on your calorie intake. For 100 days straight, he ate only ice cream, drank a small protein shake and some alcohol, and still managed to drop 32 pounds.

Ever since starting his Abs & Ice Cream YouTube Channel, back in 2011, Howard-Crow has been trying to prove that weight loss ultimately comes down to how many calories you put into your body and how many you burn. It doesn’t matter if you eat chicken breast and brown rice, or only fast food, as long as you consume less calories than you burn, you’re going to lose weight.

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The Silent Phenomenon of Adult Thumb Sucking

Thumb sucking is a perfectly normal habit for babies and young children, but while most grow out of it by age five, some never do. You’ve probably never seen an adult suck their thumb, but that’s only because the vast majority of adult thumb-suckers avoid doing it in public for fear of being laughed at or labeled as “weirdos”. Some experts believe that adult thumb sucking is quite common, with around 1 in 10 adults secretly engaging in the habit for comfort.

Thumb sucking is said to start in the uterus, even before we come into this world. It is considered a comforting gesture that mimics the endorphin rush babies get when breastfeeding, and is most common in children coping with mild anxiety. The same is true for adult thumb-suckers. While they are no longer breastfed, sucking their thumb is an effective way of dealing with anxiety or just completely relaxing at bedtime. Some have relied on their thumb to sooth them for as long as they can remember, and it has just become a normal part of everyday life.

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These Designer Plastic Covers Are Like Raincoats for Your Expensive Sneakers

So, you’re wearing a pair of fly Yeezy sneakers that you paid over $350 for, when it suddenly starts to rain, what do you do? You can take shelter and wait for the rain to stop, which still leaves you at risk of stepping in a puddle or mud, or you can just put on a pair of plastic bags for protection. Neither of those solutions is very elegant, which is why someone created Dry Steppers, a pair of raincoats for your feet.

Dry Steppers are high-quality plastic sheaths designed for sneaker heads who don’t mind paying $20 to keep their cool footwear looking fresh and pristine in any weather. They are both rain and snow-resistant and can also protect your expensive sneakers from gravel and dust. They are basically an upgraded version of the old plastic shopping bag trick, where people will tie bags around their feet to protect their shoes. They are made from tear-resistant plastic, feature non-slip rubber soles, as well as an adjustable draw-string and zipper system that insulates the shoe area perfectly. You can even get them printed with a variety of popular sneaker models, like Yeezy 350 V2’s, a Yeezy 750’s, or Jordan Air 11’s, to show off what you have on underneath.

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Meet America’s Only Water Sommelier

A sommelier is usually defined as a wine expert who makes recommendations on what wine goes best with certain meals, at a restaurant. But Martin Riese doesn’t know a lot about wines. He is a professional water sommelier, the only one in the the United States.

German-born Riese has been fascinated with the different tastes of water since he was 4-years-old. His parents, who worked in the hospitality industry, would take him vacationing all over Europe, and the first thing he always did was try the tap water. To him, it tasted different everywhere he went, so he couldn’t understand why everyone always called it the same thing. Later, he would learn that he had been blessed with a very special palette that allows him to detect the subtle differences in the taste of different mineral waters. Luckily for him, there was actually a job that required just the kind of unique talent he had – water sommelier.

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New App Stops You from Spending Money When You’re Drunk

If you’re the kind of person who goes goes online to buy all kinds of weird things in the early hours of the morning, after an alcohol-fueled night out, you may be interested in a new smartphone app that blocks your credit cards for 12 hours if it thinks you’re too drunk to shop.

DrnkPay is a smartphone app that stops users from making purchases while drunk, which is apparently something people end up regretting. It was developed by UK financial consultancy company iBe TSE, after research found that half of British alcohol drinkers admitted that they regret a purchase made when drunk. The survey that inspired Drnkpay also revealed a few bizarre examples of things bought while intoxicated, like flying lessons, a rowing club lifetime membership for someone who doesn’t row, 30 pairs of flip flops, and even a live chicken.

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Brazilian Man Spends 40 Years Bringing a Forest Back to Life

83-year-old Antonio Vicente has spent the last four decades of his life fighting against the current. As Brazilian landowners cut down rainforests to make room for profitable plantations and cattle grazing grounds, he struggled to bring the lush jungles of his childhood back to life. Today, his efforts are being rewarded, as the completely stripped land he once began planting trees on 40 years ago, has become a beautiful jungle teeming with tropical wildlife once again.

It was 1973 when Antonio took up the challenge of restoring the forest on a 31-hectare piece of land that had been razed for cattle grazing. Ironically enough, he bought the land on the outskirts of Sao Pablo, in Brazil’s Sao Paulo region, using credits that the military government was giving out to promote deforestation and investing in advanced agricultural technology. But Antonio had no intention of using the money to boost the national agriculture. He just wanted to revive the forest.

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Antisocial Woman Pretends to Be Blind for 28 Years So She Wouldn’t Have to Greet People

28 years ago, Carmen Jiménez, from Madrid, Spain, became completely blind due to a serious eye injury. At least that’s what she told everyone, including her own family, because she was tired of having to say “hello” to people she didn’t actually want to greet.

The 57-year-old woman recently revealed that she had always been able to see perfectly, which left her family in shock, even though they had always suspected that something was of about her condition. Her husband told reporters that she would put on her makeup perfectly, and sometimes they would see her trying to look at the TV from the corner of her eyes. But she never admitted to faking her blindness, until recently

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Chinese School’s Football Field Has a Tree Growing in the Middle of It

Students at Beijing’s Yucai High School have to be very careful when playing football on the school’s well-maintained field. That’s because it has a 100-year-old tree growing smack in the middle of it, and keeping their eye on the ball too much can result in a painful collision.

Building a football field around a tree sounds pretty stupid, but it’s not like the Chinese school had a choice. Yucai High School is reportedly surrounded by various historical buildings, and this was the only available space for a football field. Before starting work on site, the school did ask permission to have the tree transplanted someplace else, but they were notified that it was hundreds of years old, and considered a national treasure. Having it transplanted was considered too risky, so they were left with no choice but to build the field around it.

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This Designer Wants to Make Flashing LED Eyelashes a Thing

You probably never even knew you wanted colored LED eyelashes, but just look at the pretty lights. Yeah, you want them!

Swedish Arduino designer Tien Pham has been getting a lot of attention lately for an unusual tech-inspired beauty product – interactive LED eyelashes that stick to your eyelids with regular eyelash glue. Called F.Lashes, these eye-catching accessories come in pink, red, blue, light blue, white, yellow and green, and feature different lighting modes, like follow, where the lights follow the movements of your head, dance mode, where they just blink at short intervals when you move your body, and sparkle, with the LEDs lighting up individually to create a sparkle effect.

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Long-Term Gas Leak Makes Woman Allergic to Virtually Everything, Including People

After being exposed to a long-term gas leak in her home for a long period of time, a Los Angeles woman’s immune system turned against itself, making her allergic to food, water, clothing, technology with an electromagnetic field, and even people.

30-year-old Pilar Olave, a Chilean-born actress from Los Angeles, California, has been living in her room, isolated from the rest of the world, for the last two years. Due to severe allergies, coming into contact with certain chemicals, foods and bacteria that most of us carry around can trigger a variety of symptoms, like acute stomach pain, headaches, nausea, heart palpitations and tight chest. For now, Pilar can’t even kiss or touch her own husband, because her body is hypersensitive to bacteria.

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This Smartphone Case Doubles as an Espresso Machine

Mokase is the world’s first smartphone case that also serves users a warm shot of espresso whenever and wherever they want. It’s aimed at people who are always on the go, whose hectic lifestyle prevents them from stopping by a coffee shop or even a vending machine for a dose of caffeine.

Smart K, the Italian company that came up with the concept for Mokase, claims that they were looking for a way to make coffee available anywhere, and pairing it with the smartphone just made the most sense. “We thought, ‘how to make it always available? Why not join it to a gadget that is already a piece of our lifetime?’ the smartphone is the answer,” Smart K stated in a press release.

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13-Year-Old Japanese Girl Sparks Debate about Age in the Modelling Industry

Momoka Kurita made quite an impression when she posed as a “race queen” during a superbike racing event in Japan, last year. Adult men showered her with compliments for her stunning looks, but little did they know that she was just 12-years-old at the time, and still in elementary school.

Her appearance at the 2016 48th MFJ Grand Prix, in Suzuka, kickstarted Momoka’s modelling career, but it also sparked a heated online debated about age in the industry. While recognizing her stunning looks, many argued that dressing a 12-year-old child in a sexy attire and having her participate in an adult event was just wrong. Most of them blamed the parents, but the now 13-year-old girl claims that nobody forced her into it, and that her parents are just supportive of her dreams.

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Man Wins 23-Kilometer Race He Ran in His Socks

Ibrahim Mukunga Wachira, a 27-year-old marathon runner from Kenya, became an overnight sensation in the small Baltic country of Estonia, after winning the 35th annual Tartu Half-Marathon, a 23-kilometer race he ran in his socks.

Just last week, we wrote about the monumental achievement of María Lorena Ramírez, a native Rarámuri woman from Mexico, who won a 50-kilometer ultramarathon in rubber sandals made from used car tires and wearing a long traditional skirt. Today, we cover the amazing story of a man who not only won a 23-kilometer marathon in Estonia, but also set a new speed record, after running with no shoes on. It’s definitely an incredible time for sports, and running in particular.

 

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