A café in Istanbul is making headlines for exclusively hiring people with Down syndrome. The aptly named ‘Down Café’ employs staff between the ages of 18 and 25, and aims to empower them with self-confidence and independence.

Saruhan Singen, who founded the café in the Sisli district of Istanbul, said that he was inspired by his own experience of raising a daughter with Down syndrome. She now works at the café as well. “I have Sezil and I think she is a gift to me  to understand others like her,” Singen said. “When we think about the number of people with Down syndrome, there is not a wide range of career paths available.”

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Sick of listening to women constantly complain about having to wear high heels, one man challenged himself to wear high heels for a whole day to prove “that girls are huge complainers.” It didn’t go exactly as he planned…

As any woman will tell you, high heels can make your legs look sexy, but wearing them for long periods of time is no picnic on your feet. Even single-sole pumps and platforms will prove painful if you stand or walk in them long enough, but Brandon Cohen, a video correspondent with BroBible.com, actually went for the worst possible option – full-fledged stilettos. He meant to spend a whole day in them, doing all kinds of activities to prove his point, but only managed to keep them on from 8:30 a.m. to 7:15 p.m, most of which he spent sitting, because he couldn’t stand anymore.

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Edible pancake art is nothing new, but we have yet to see anything as detailed as the masterpieces of Tiger Tomato, a father son duo who shot to fame on the internet after posting their colored batter creations on YouTube.

Looking at their awe-inspiring pancakes, it’s hard to believe Tiger Tomato have only been at it for three months. It all started with a simplistic yet wonderfully colored rainbow pancake, which got over 150,000 views on YouTube. Inspired by the overwhelmingly positive response, the father-son duo from Melbourne, Australia, quickly stepped up their game and came up with elaborate-yet-edible renditions of popular cartoon characters like Elsa and Olaf from the Disney hit “Frozen”, Homer Simpson or Garfield.

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The otherwise quiet town of Westfield, New Jersey, has become the focus of international media attention, after a family was reportedly forced out of their home by a series of bone-chilling letters from a stalker who calls himself “The Watcher”.

Derek and Maria Broaddus bought the six-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot turn-of-the century home for $1.3 million, in June 2014. Three days after signing the papers, they started receiving creepy letters from someone who claimed to be watching the house. “My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time,” the first one read. “I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming.”

The creepy letters also mentioned the Broaddus’ children: “Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested?” the mysterious stalker asked. “Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them out to me.”

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A 65-year-old dog lover from China, has gone to great lengths to save as many dogs as she possibly could from being eaten during this year’s Yulin Dog Meat Festival. She managed to pay around $1,000 for the release of 100 otherwise doomed canines. It may not sound like much, but the media attention her actions got in international media also helped raise awareness about the cruel festival, thus increasing the chances of it being banned in the near future.

Yang Xiaoyun, a retired school teacher from Tianjin, China, traveled 1,500 miles from her home to the city of Yulin, to save scores of dogs from being slaughtered and eaten during the Dog Meat Festival. Photos shared on Chinese internet portal Netease show the 65-year-old woman walking through a market where dogs were kept in cages and paying for various sums of money for their release. Reports say she ended up paying 7,000 yuan ($1,000) to save 100 dogs.

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Some artists rely on a pint of ice cold lager for a bit of inspiration, but Chicago-based illustrator Kyle Bice actually uses amber brew to create his signature beer portraits.

Kyle Bice graduated from the American Academy of Art with a degree in traditional oil painting, but since he didn’t really believe there was much of a career for him as a painter, the young artist turned to illustration. After making a name for himself in advertising and the world of comic books, Kyle met with Fred Bueltman from New Holland Brewing, who had seen his work and asked him to redo a bunch of labels for the company. It was during this time that he discovered his passion for craft beer.

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Wesseh Freeman, a.k.a Weesay, became an internet sensation last December for his badass strumming skills. His unique handmade guitar – cobbled together from an old stick, a paint can, and three used strings – caught the attention of brothers Nikhil and Sachin Ramchandani, the owners of O! Chips, a potato chips company in Liberia. So they asked him to write a jingle for their brand, and posted a video on the company’s YouTube channel. The two-and-a-half minute clip instantly went viral.

Weesay, 37, is blind and homeless. But that hasn’t affected his musical abilities in the least. The man is truly gifted, and that’s evident just from the guitar he managed to fashion for himself. According to Guitar World, “His frets are made from bike spokes or coat hangers and are apparently movable; yet he has a mastery of intonation. This instrument should be completely out of tune…but it’s not! Weesay plays it like a boss.”

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UK-based artist Julie Alice Chappell has chosen an unusual medium for her sculptures – discarded electronics. She tears out circuit boards and other components from broken devices, and converts them into delicate insect figurines.

Julie’s introduction to the unique art form occurred several years ago, when she happened to find a big box of tiny electronic components at ‘The Craft Bank’, in Portsmouth, UK. “The first thing that came into my head when I looked at them was, ‘a mass of tiny bodies and legs… ants!’ I took them home to my children and we made ants.”

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Calling Albert Podell ‘well traveled’ would be an understatement. 78-year-old Podell, a former Playboy editor, can truly say that he’s seen it all, after spending half a century visiting every country in the world. He’s encountered pretty much everything on his travels, right from guerillas in Yemen, to flying-crab attacks in Algeria, and police interrogations in Cuba. He has chased water buffaloes, broken his bones, and eaten all kinds of weird stuff. He’s been robbed, arrested, and almost lynched!

Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very young age. “Aged six, I started to collect postage stamps, and where the other kids specialised in certain countries, I wanted a stamp from every country in the world,” he told Daily Mail. “Getting a passport stamp from every one may have been inspired by that.”

“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper also instilled in me a fascination with travel because I wanted to see the lands where all the objects, people, and places depicted on those stamps came from.” So he resolved early on that “there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”

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Communications specialist Clay Hielscher seems like an average guy, but pay his home a visit and you’ll realise why he’s called the real-life Tony Stark. The Kansas man not only resembles the popular comic book character, but he is also passionate about building superhero suits from scratch – his house is like a costume prop shop for a motion picture studio.

Hielscher is a former law enforcement officer, which sort of explains his obsession with superhero battlesuits. It all started a few years ago, when he was building a 17-foot kayak, just to let off some steam. One of his friends took a look at his work and suggested that he try to construct an Iron Man battlesuit.

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Nylon stockings can be sexy, but in the hands of artist Rosa Verloop, they take a turn toward the grotesque.

The Dutch artist is famous for using nylon stockings to create distorted sculptures of the human form. She collects thousands of used stockings in nude shades which she then molds, tucks, and sews together until they take on recognizable human shapes. Verloop layers and clumps the material, sometimes holding it up with pushpins, to produce wrinkled and distorted facial features.

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Every year, in the month of May, women from the Nahua villages of Guerrero, Mexico, get together to beat the living daylights out of each other. All the blood they spill during the fight is collected in buckets, and later used to plough and water their lands. The villagers believe that this bizarre ritual will bring the rain and provide bountiful harvests!

The festival, like many others in Mexico, combines catholic and prehispanic traditions. On the first day, women wake up early to make large quantities of food. They prepare turkey, chicken, rice, boiled eggs, pozole, mole, and tortillas, which they take along with them to the fighting grounds. At the official site, they lay out the food and decorate the area with flowers and inflated turkey bellies. They recite prayers for the virgin Mary and for the local rain god Tlaloc, after which it is time for the fighting to begin.

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Jake Harms converts old Apple iMac computers into beautiful aquariums. He spends hours locked up in his basement workshop, giving these old computers a new lease of life. So far, he’s sold over 1,000 aquariums to customers all over the world.

Jake said that he specifically uses 2000-era Apple iMac G3 computers, because of their distinct shape and bright color schemes. The opaque computer frames allow light to shine through them, so that the fish are visible from various angles. He uses iMacs because they’re a lot better looking than the beige and grey models of other brands.

“No one’s ever asked me to make an aquarium out of a Dell,” he jokingly says.

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Rats are normally classified as vermin, but they can be heroes too. Proving the fact is APOPO, a Belgian NGO that trains African giant pouched rats to sniff out landmines and tuberculosis infections. Since 2006, these ‘hero rats’ have been working on minefields in Mozambique, clearing the country of over 13,000 landmines, thus reclaiming over 11 million square meters of land. They’ve also accurately analyzed over a quarter of a million blood samples for TB infections.

Bart Weetjens, founder of APOPO, first came up with the idea of training sniffer rats a couple of decades ago, when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. He used to keep pet rodents as a boy, so he knew that they were “very trainable, sociable, and intelligent creatures.” So when he read an article about gerbils being taught to recognise the scent of explosives, it got him thinking.

Weetjens wanted to use his experience of dealing with rodents to find a locally-sourced resolution to the problem of landmines. “I was looking for an appropriate solution that communities at the bottom of the pyramid could use, independent from expensive foreign know-how and technology,” he said. So he placed himself in the situation of the people affected by the problem, and looked at the resources they had at hand.

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Chinese artist Ren Ri successfully combines his love of beekeeping and art to create accurate honeycomb maps of various countries and continents.

Ren works closely with honeybees; in fact, he considers himself more of a beekeeper than a professional artist. He started beekeeping in 2007, and within a year, he mastered the basics. As he got more proficient, he began to think of ways in which he could manipulate the bees’ movements, by controlling the queen bee. Over time, he started creating meaningful beeswax patterns, and he eventually managed to produce a world map.

To create the map, Ren placed a map of the world inside the beehive. He then manipulated the queen bee to move in different directions and angles, so that the bees would build the hive at the locations he desired. “The bees continued to mould the beehive, and this moulding affected the original shape I had given the piece, through a process of addition and subtraction,” he said. Once the world map was ready, Ren created individual maps of several countries as well. He called the series Yuan Su I: The Origin of Geometry.

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