Believe it or not, a real-life Planet of the Apes does exist in an isolated area located deep in the jungles of West Africa. It’s home to dozens of retired laboratory chimpanzees who were at one point used for medical research. These chimps are practically heroes – they’ve managed to survive disease, two civil wars and numerous medical tests and experiments.

The apes are former residents of The Liberian Institute of Biomedical Research (Vilab II) which played a pivotal role in developing treatments for ailments such as Hepatitis during the 1970s. It was shut down in the mid-2000s due to growing pressure from animal rights activists, and the apes were transferred to a remote Liberian island in the middle of Farmington River, to live a life of quiet retirement.

The island – known to locals as ‘Monkey Island’ – is home to over 60 chimps who only allow familiar caretakers to approach its shores. Their story was covered in a short documentary film called Island of the Apes made to promote the 2014 film Dawn of the Planet of the Apes.

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Dead Raising Team (DRT) is a team of evangelical Christians who boast that they can raise people from the dead with their prayers. Tyler Johnson, the group’s charismatic leader, claims to be responsible for bringing 13 corpses back to life!

The DRT story was covered in the 2013 documentary film Deadraiser. It depicts various miracle stories where DRT members pray for dead people and witness them come alive. Some of the people who allegedly came back from the dead claimed to have seen hell and the demons who were torturing them. But they were ultimately saved and pulled back to earth.

Mark DeDio, for instance, used to be a troubled drug user who actually claims to have died in 2006 as a result of an overdose. The next thing he knew, “there was screeching, torment, screams. The smell was just like vomit, sulphur.” But he was eventually saved by DRT member TJ Aderholdt, who happened to pass by the ambulance in which Mark’s corpse lay.

Although the man had no pulse, TJ began speaking in tongues as soon as he spotted Mark. Within minutes, Mark’s eyes popped open, he stood up and started telling everybody how he went to hell and was pulled back. “It was like a grab on my collar,” he recalled. “Jesus pulled me out.”

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Hu Juan, a 28-year-old mother of two from Hunan, China, suffers from a rare condition known as Cutis laxa which has caused the skin on her face and neck to age at an accelerated rate, leaving her looking like a woman in her 60s or 70s.

The young woman’s nightmare began 11 years ago, right after she gave birth to her eldest son. She started noticing that her appearance was changing fast and just six months after giving birth, her youthful looks had deteriorated drastically to the point where she could hardly recognize herself in the mirror. Hu Juan was diagnosed with Cutis laxa, an extremely rare connective tissue disorder that causes the skin to become loose, saggy and wrinkled at a very rapid speed due to loss of elasticity. It has only affected her face and neck, and several medical checkups over the years revealed that she is otherwise  in good health. Hu Juan is the only known Cutis laxa sufferer in China and one of ten worldwide. Read More »

The isolated Dutch village of Hogewey, located on the outskirts of the town of Weesp, has only 152 inhabitants who seem to be living a normal life – they eat, sleep, walk around the village and visit shops and restaurants. But in reality, every single one of them is being constantly watched. That’s because Hogewey is actually an elder care facility, and all of its residents suffer from dementia.

‘Dementia Village’ takes care to maintain the illusion that life is normal for the residents. The 152 patients have no idea that their home is a mental institution, nor that their living quarters are constantly monitored. Within the village, residents do not live in wards and there are no long hallways or corridors. Instead, they live in groups of six or seven to a house, with one or two caretakers. The homes are furnished according to the time period when the residents’ short-term memories stopped functioning properly – the 1950s, 1970s, and the 2000s, all accurate down to the tablecloths.

The residents are allowed to freely roam the grounds and admire its landscaped trees and fountains, or rest on the benches. Caretakers are stationed all over the village; 250 full and part time nurses and geriatric specialists wander the town as cashiers, grocery-store attendees, post-office clerks and more. Finances have simply been taken out of the equation, as everything is included in the family’s payment plan.

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If you look carefully at Armenian artist Davit Yukhanyan’s meticulously intricate illustrations, you’ll realize that they actually consist of hundreds of smaller illustrations that make up the form, background and shading of the main drawing.

The incredibly talented 26-year-old has been drawing and creating for as long as he can remember. Although he works as an architect now, he tries to draw whenever he finds the time. “Drawing is my passion and music is my inspiration,” he said.

For his ‘drawings within a drawing’, he uses a technical pen and paper, and makes them entirely by hand with no digital manipulation. “Just as everything in our world consists of different pieces, my drawing also consists of different pieces in the form of small illustrations that come together into one overall creation,” he said. “I draw the artwork with this concept in mind.”

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A vegan butcher shop sounds like an oxymoron, but believe it or not, such a venue is soon going to be operating in the US. Having surpassed their Kickstarter goal of $60,000, ‘The Herbivorous Butcher’ will be setting up shop in Minneapolis – bringing meat-free meat to vegans and vegetarians in the area. They’re going to be serving a host of meatless options, including ribs, bacon, chicken, sausage and more.

Siblings Aubry and Kale Walch are the brains behind Herbivorous Butcher. They have combined their vegetarian lifestyle with their Guamanian roots, and added touches from culinary cultures from around the world to create fake meats that have the texture and flavor of real red meats.

“We have carefully crafted 100% vegan, cruelty-free meat alternatives that capture the best flavors, textures, and nutrients that meats have to offer without their negative impacts on health, animals, and the environment,” they revealed. Some of the benefits of their products include – ‘small batch from scratch’, ‘hand-crafted’, ‘cholesterol free’, and ‘protein rich’.

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50-year-old George Prior wanted to show the world just how harmful Coca-Cola can be to the human body. So he embarked on a special ‘Coke diet’ challenge during which he consumed 10 cans of Coke a day for three months. That’s 35 g of sugar per can, and a total of 350 g of sugar every day, which is the equivalent of 70 sugar cubes. Needless to say, the results were not good.

George’s formerly healthy and muscular physique has now changed drastically. His Coke guzzling habits gave him a pot belly, he lost muscle mass, and his weight shot up from 168 lb to 192 lb. His blood pressure also soared from 129/77 to 145/96 – way above the ideal 120/80. All these alterations to his body have greatly increased the risk of heart disease or stroke.

George also said that he was experiencing intense cravings and feared he was becoming addicted to Coca-Cola. He did try his best to stick to his normal Paleo diet with low carbohydrates, lean meats, vegetables and berries, but he couldn’t shake off the sugar cravings that hit him from time to time. In fact, he found it difficult to eat as much food because all that Coke made him feel full at lunch and dinner times. And the actual drinking was an ‘irritating chore’ because of the constant visits to the restroom and a clutter of cans everywhere.

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In a bid to deliver the tales of the Bible to all the cultures and religions of the world, French author Philippe Lechermeier has given the ancient text a makeover – he’s rewritten it as a fictional novel! He describes the book as a ‘spirit of cultural transmission without a religious message of faith or prayer’.

“For me this text stands for the common good,” the 46-year-old said. “Its sphere of influence could go well beyond religious boundaries. Its impact on our language, our psychology, our aesthetic, our morality is still very powerful.” He revealed that he grew up listening to his grandmother’s personalised versions of Biblical narratives, and this inspired him to transform stories in his own way.

Philippe, who happens to be an atheist, described the Old Testament as a ‘poorly written text from a literary point of view’. “When my children were small, I was trying to read them passages from the Bible. But it bothered them, especially because there are redundancies and inconsistencies.” So he wanted to make the Holy Book more accessible through good writing and elegant style that emphasize the depth of the characters.

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If you thought Skywriting was a romantic way to propose, wait till you hear about GPS writing. The ingenious idea belongs to Yasushi Takahashi – a.k.a Yassan – who spent six whole months trekking through Japan as a way of proposing to his girlfriend. At the end of his journey, the GPS records of his travels spelled the phrase ‘Marry Me’ with a heart sign to boot.

It all started in 2008, when Yassan, then 31, quit his job and planned a journey through Japan, taking with him a GPS device and a map. His purpose was two-fold: to experience a Japan that he only knew in books, and also to draw a special message for his girlfriend using GPS tracking technology. Yassan managed to cover over 7,000 kilometers in six months, mostly by foot and sometimes by car, ferry or bicycle. Every place that he walked through was carefully planned beforehand to get the gigantic magic phrase just right.

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Chinese student Zu Bingqun is living the dream of almost every comic book lover in the world. No, he hasn’t become a superhero himself, but he does have an amazing collection of Avengers suits that he built himself, from scratch. Zu said that by building the suits, he is trying to fulfill his own childhood dream of becoming a superhero.

A senior student at the Changchun University of Technology, Zu has been working on the outfits since 2012. He starts by downloading a blueprint of each superhero’s suits and buying the necessary materials for the build online. He then begins the painstaking process of molding each part of the suit and putting it all together.

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Togbe Ngoryifia Céphas Kosi Bansah, a.k.a King Bansah of the Hohoe, is a real African king who doesn’t believe in old-fashioned methods of governance. He prefers to live in Germany and rules his subjects via Skype! The 66-year-old king moved to Germany several years ago as a foreign exchange student – he fell in love with the country and decided to stay.

Interestingly, King Bansah was named successor to the crown in 1987, when his grandfather – the reigning king – died. He was chosen over his father and older brother, simply because they were left handed. The trait is apparently considered unclean and indicative of dishonesty in Hohoe.

The coronation ceremony took place in 1992, but King Bansah decided him being a king didn’t require moving back to Africa. He still lives in Ludwigshafen, near Frankfurt, with his German wife Gabriele, where he runs a car repair garage and also finds the time to govern the 200,000 Hohoe people in southeastern Ghana, through Skype and telephone calls. According to news reports, he even stays up late at night to rule on tribal disputes and makes sure to visit his kingdom at least six times a year.

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The Aztec death whistle produces a sound so horrifying, it will chill you to the bone. Described as the ‘scream of a thousand corpses’, the death whistle sounds like the cry of the un-dead, or the torment of a human being burned alive.

Interestingly, the skull-shaped whistles were discovered 20 years ago by archaeologists, but were dismissed as mere toys. Most studies focused on how they looked, but no one really thought to blow into them. Now that the fearsome sound of the whistle has been discovered, it is attracting the attention of scientists, musicians and historians alike.

According to 66-year-old mechanical engineer Roberto Velazquez, who has spent several years recreating the sounds of his pre-Columbian ancestors, the Aztecs played the mournful ‘Whistles of Death’ just before they were sacrificed to the gods. Some historians believe that the Aztecs used to sound the death whistle in order to help the deceased journey into the underworld. Tribes are said to have used the terrifying sounds as psychological warfare, to frighten enemies at the start of battle.

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New York resident Andre McDonnell spends all his spare time handing out free shoes to the homeless. Through his charity organisation ‘It’s From the Sole’, the generous 40-year-old has given away over 5,000 pairs of shoes in less than three years.

Andre’s idea is very simple: he collects new or gently used sneakers through donations, and then cleans them thoroughly himself. He actually spends $50 to $60 each week to wash donated shoes at a laundromat. Once the shoes are cleaned, Andre walks to the Grand Central Terminal and Union Square every day to hand them out to the homeless. Whenever he makes a donation, he takes a photograph along with the recipient and emails it to the donor. He also puts up the pictures on his Instagram page, where he has over 2,000 followers.

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The ‘Survival Condo Project’ is a luxury bunker complex located in a missile silo 15 storeys below ground level in Kansas. It is designed to help the rich survive any disaster – including health pandemics, weather calamities, or nuclear terror attacks – without having to relinquish opulence and style.

The missile silo was originally built in the 1960s by the US Army Corps of Engineers for the Atlas F missile. Its 9-foot thick walls, built out of epoxy-hardened concrete, are capable of withstanding a direct nuclear attack. The dome structure that covers the silo can also tolerate winds of over 500 mph.

Recently, the silo was purchased by real estate developer Larry Hall, who has been in the business of building advanced survival condos since 2008. He claims that the dwellings his company builds can make it possible to lead an uninterrupted life of luxury underground.

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The West African nation of Ghana is home to a subculture of artists who create outlandish versions of popular Hollywood movie posters. The art form was at its peak in the nation during the 1980s and 1990s, commonly referred to as the ‘Golden Age of Movie Posters’. During this time, artists would let their imagination run wild in order to create posters that would never fail to draw audiences to Africa’s dilapidated cinema halls. So they used their artistic license to add weapons, scenes and characters that didn’t even exist in the original movie!

The art form began to lose momentum in the 2000s, when Ghanaians purchased their own TVs and VCRs, causing several movie houses to close down. But over time, the lurid hand-painted posters have only increased in value. In fact, several Western art collectors are willing to pay thousands of dollars for them. Some of the artists who have been out of work for several years are now finding a new lease of life in reproducing posters of more recent movies for art aficionados.

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