I’ve heard of people buying extra pairs of their favorite jeans, but a Louisiana veterinarian has actually gone and gotten himself two extra copies of his favorite dog! Phillip Dupont spent over $100,000 cloning his beloved pet dog Melvin because he simply couldn’t bear to part with him.

Phillip had Melvin cloned about two years ago, and he now has two identical dogs – Ken Gordon, named after his uncle, and Henry Fontenot, named after his friend – with the same traits and characteristics as Melvin. The pups were around for the last year of Melvin’s life, who was nearly 12 when Dupont had to put him down last year, due to his failing health.

Ken and Henry have now replaced Melvin as fixtures at Dupont’s clinic in Lafayette. “They’re maturing into the dog that Melvin was,” said Paula, Phillip’s wife. “I used to tell people that Melvin was the office greeter – my office manager. Ken’s kind of taken his place. Henry has stepped up and is also greeting people. Now they have two dogs meeting people – standing up and putting their paws on my desk.”

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Turns out Santa Claus is real, and he actually lives in North Pole! Don’t get too excited though – North Pole is a suburb in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Santa Claus is the legal name of one of its residents, although he definitely looks the part.

At North Pole, the atmosphere is festive all year. The streets are always decorated in holiday spirit, the light posts look like candy canes and the streets have names like ‘Snowman Lane’ and ‘St. Nicholas Drive’. So it’s only befitting to have a ‘Santa Claus’ live there. According to his Facebook page, Claus is “the only man legally named Santa Claus ever to live in North Pole, Alaska.”

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Desperate to raise funds for her ailing father’s treatment, a teenager in China’s Anhui province has taken to wearing a cow mask and charging people 5 yuan to ride her. She’s been at it for the past three months, but Hefei locals have branded her a fraud.

Now, news reports are featuring photographs of 15-year-old Hao Dongdong with her paralysed father, proving that she’s been telling the truth all along. “My dad needs 5,000 Yuan each month for medical treatments,” she told reporters. “My brother and sister need to go to school. I have no identity card [for work] so I have to beg.”

Dongdong’s father Hao Xinli used to be a farmer, but a back injury forced him to move to the city in 2000 to set up a small shop. Last year, when he and his wife were shopping in Hefei, they saw a mobile store giving away freebies as a promotional offer. They ran to the shop and tried taking what they could, but soon got into an altercation with the sales staff. Xinli was beaten badly, and his back pain became excruciating.

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After 25 years of teaching art at several schools, Valery Khramov finally retired from his job, but not from art. The 90-year-old spent the entire summer painting the walls at the school where he currently works as a watchman. He singlehandedly managed to transform the boring institution into an ethereal space, just in time for the new academic year.

“I spent the last three months at school,” Valery told the local media. “All I did was paint and draw. It has been 10 days since I slept – it was necessary to have time to finish everything for the new academic year.” And now that the kids are back in school, they’re absolutely thrilled with the new decor. In fact, first graders are actually being taken on tours of the ‘gallery’. What a fantastic way to beat back-to-school blues!

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Chinese doctors are baffled by a bizarre, five-inch growth on an elderly woman’s head. They aren’t able to explain what it is exactly, but it bears an uncanny resemblance to a unicorn’s horn! 

It all started when ‘Unicorn Woman’ Liang Xiuzhen developed a mole on her head about seven or eight years ago. “My mother complained about this mole-like growth on her head that itched all the time,” said her son Wang Chaojun. “We found ways to cure her itch using traditional Chinese medicine, and then left it be.”

But matters got out of hand a couple of years ago, when a tiny horn-like mass erupted out of the mole. It was quite small up until this February, when Liang accidentally broke it. Since then, a new horn has been rapidly growing in its place, now measuring a whopping five inches in length. “Now the horn hurts my mother and prevents her from sleeping. It also bleeds from time to time,” Wang Chaojun said. Read More »

Located on the banks of the river Nidd, near Knaresborough in North Yorkshire, is a mystical well that converts objects to stone. Any object touched by the well’s dripping waters – leaves, sticks, dead birds, and more – naturally turn to stone within a few months!

For many centuries, locals believed that the Petrifying Well was cursed by the devil – a myth fueled by the fact that the side of the well looks like a giant’s skull. They constantly lived with the fear that if they touched the well’s water, they would be turned to stone too.

A few adventurous people left everyday objects near the waterfall, only to witness the transformation occur over weeks. Some of these relics can be spotted even today, like a Victorian top hat and a lady’s bonnet from the 1800s – both converted to solid stone. More recently, people have left teddy bears, kettles, and even a bicycle in the petrifying well, with similar results.

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Situated in Salangsdalen, Norway’s Troms county, Polar Park has a diverse population of wild animals, including foxes, reindeer, wolverines, wolves, lynx, elk, musk, and bears. But the most popular attraction is the Wolf Camp, a facility set up with the goal of ensuring a better life for wolves in captivity. It also provides visitors with the unique opportunity up-close and personal with the beautiful creatures.

So how is it that these ferocious wolves are able to accept human company with such ease? Well, it turns out that in the wild, wolves are actually afraid of humans – so they lash out under stress. But the animals at Polar Park were raised to enjoy the company of humans, so they feel calm around visitors. Known as the ‘Salangen wolf pack’, these are the first wolves in Norway that is socialized with humans. That means they actually enjoy our presence as part of their environment and will even come up to visitors to cuddle with them a or lick their faces.

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A 75-year-old Englishwoman shocked the world by opting for euthanasia over natural death from old age. In spite of being in good health, the retired nurse decided to end her life because she could not bear the thought of growing old and frail. Before her death, Gill Pharaoh stated that she did not want to burden her children with the responsibility of caring for her.

Pharaoh specialised in nursing the elderly – she apparently developed a distaste for the life of the elderly, having witnessed it in close quarters. Towards the end of her life, she had checked into a Swiss suicide clinic, and in her last interview, she revealed how she had lost interest in life. She no longer enjoyed gardening, dinner parties, and was suffering from tinnitus.

“I do not think old age is fun,” she had said. “I have just gone over the hill now. It is not going to start getting better. I have looked after people who are old, on and off, all my life. I have always said, ‘I am not getting old. I do not think old age is fun.’”

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If you love odd culinary combinations, then the ‘dausage’ is just the thing for you. The half-donut, half-sausage is a savory-sweet mash-up of pork or beef and jam or custard, invented by web developer and food lover Liam Bennett.

“I was inspired to invent the dausage by the success of the cronut and the duffin,” the 37-year-old from Wales said. “I love jam donuts, and I really love those products, but I wanted to make something a bit different, so I came up with the idea of trying a sausage. I was trying to think what else you could mix with a donut. I was looking at things that go well with sweet things, duck with plum sauce. I thought I’d give the sausage a go because, well, I eat sausages.”

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Slugs are not what you’d normally call “cute” creatures, but the Jorunna Parva species is an exception. These marine slugs bear a striking resemblance to small rabbits, which has recently earned them the nickname ‘sea bunnies’.

Jorunna parva slugs were discovered by Japanese malacologist Kikutaro Baba in 1938, but the rest of the world has only become aware of their irresistible cuteness last year, when footage from a Japanese diving school was released online. The clip, featuring parva off the coast of Japan, has gone viral on the internet and people all over the world are going ga-ga over the adorable underwater creatures.

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The Yipao is a unique annual tradition in Colombia’s Coffee Triangle dedicated to the Willys Jeeps, the iconic American car the locals have been relying on since the 1940s.

For the people of Quindío district, Jeeps have been a source of livelihood and a significant part of daily life since the 1940s. The unpaved roads of the coffee mountains are filled with Jeeps that transport people and their belongings – including piles of coffee bags, livestock, harvested produce, and more. When families have to relocate, they often pile all their belongings onto one Jeep and move in a single trip.

Jeeps are such an integral part of life that they’re fondly known in Spanish as ‘mulitas mécanicas (mechanical mules). The country’s farmers use them to get to places that were previously accessible only by riding pack animals. Given how deeply Jeeps have impacted the life of locals, it’s only befitting that they pay homage to the vehicle during the annual Yipao parade.

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Chinese surgeons recently performed a bizarre surgery in order to save a man’s severed hand. They grafted it on to his ankle for a month, before reattaching it to his arm!

The innovative surgery was carried out on factory worker Zhou, from Changsha, China’s Hunan province. Zhou’s left hand was accidentally severed from his arm during an accident involving a spinning blade machine. He was immediately rushed to Xiangya Hospital, where Dr. Tang Juyu and his team realised that the damaged nerves and tendons needed time to heal. If they tried to attach the hand to his arm immediately, its cells would die from lack of blood supply.

“Under normal temperatures, a severed finger needs to resume blood supply within 10 hours, but that time is even shorter for a separated limb,” Tang explained. “If a limb is short of blood for too long, its tissues die and it will be unsalvageable.” Read More »

Scottish singer James McElvar was recently in the news not for his vocal prowess, but for fainting on a flight! The teenager was so desperate to avoid paying excess baggage fee that he put on 12 layers of clothing. his overheated body didn’t really like the idea and he ended up passing out at 37,000 ft, on the way from London to Glasgow.

James, 19, is a member of a Scottish boyband called Rewind. When the band arrived at Stansted Airport last Wednesday, James was told by EasyJet staff that he would have to pay £45 for the excess weight he had packed into his suitcase and rucksack. “The woman told me either one of my bags went in the hold or we weren’t getting on,” he later told the media. “The rest of the band had gone through so I couldn’t give them any of my clothes.”

Unwilling to cough up the cash, James did the first thing that occurred to him – he unpacked his bag and started to put on all his clothes. He didn’t stop until he had about 12 layers of clothing on! “I felt it was the only option, to put everything on,” the singer explained. He ended up dressing himself in six t-shirts, four jumpers, three pairs of jeans, two pairs of jogging bottoms, a pair of jackets, and two hats.

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Li Rongjun, an aspiring architect from China, has built himself an spectacular office. In a bid to showcase his mad construction skills, he’s used 8,500 beer bottles to make the entire upper floor of a two-storey building!

The 300-square foot office, located in Chongqing city, consists of 40 layers of bottles that Li and his father laid out over four months. Pictures show how he cleverly stacked the bottles in rows with the bottoms facing inward sand filling the gaps with stones and cement.

“I wanted to build an artistic and usable office,” said Li, who graduated from the Inner Mongolia University of Science and Technology this year. “This building is also my calling card for my future business plans. It will allow investors to see my products in real life and see my talent.”

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Parents are forever telling kids not to play with food, but Japanese artist Makoto Asano does just that. He carves smiling faces into tubs of Häagen-Dazs ice cream, using nothing but the flimsy plastic spoon they come with.

Asano’s ice cream faces may look childish to some people, but there’s a certain whimsical quality about them that makes them stand out. Each face is carved out of a different flavor of ice cream, with sauces and toppings forming features such as hair, mustaches, or beards.

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