When a woman from Nanjing, China, read that chewing gum could help her lose weight, she decided to give the technique a try. Unfortunately, she seems to have taken it a bit too far. After incessantly chewing gum every single day for the past six months, the technique backfired on her – not only did she fail to lose weight, her jaw actually bulked up from all the exercise!

The woman, who is going by the pseudonym Gao, said that it all started when she and her friends read an article about the benefits of chewing gum. The report reasoned that chewing gum burns up to 60 calories per hour, while jumping rope burns only 10. If you do the math, it adds up to losing 5 kg of weight a month just by chewing gum all day long. It also explained that chewing gum could lead to a feeling of satiety, making a person consume less food.

Convinced by the story, Gao started chewing gum morning to night, every single day. She kept it up for about six months, but her extra pounds didn’t seem too affected by the daily ritual. Instead, her colleagues began to point out changes to her face! They started to notice that her previously pointed face had now developed a rather masculine, square shape.

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When a man from China’s Hunan province got into a car accident last month, little did he know that his misfortune would actually affect his love life. He was rushed to the hospital following the accident, where staff began contacting his loved ones. To everyone’s great surprise, no less than seventeen women turned up at the hospital, claiming to be his girlfriends. And it didn’t take them long to figure out that they were all there to see the same guy. It turns out that the man, whose last name is Yuan, had actually been seeing all those women simultaneously and swindling them for large sums of money.

Most of the women are from Hunan province – the oldest is 40, while the youngest, a student, is only 19 years old. He was apparently married to one of them, and had a child with another. When they came to know the truth, all 17 of them were understandably shocked, and later, furious. “I was really worried when I heard that he was in the hospital,” said Xiao Li, Yuan’s girlfriend of 18 months. “But when I started seeing more and more beautiful girls show up, I couldn’t cry anymore.”

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Moldovan businessman and multi-millionaire Dmitry Kaminskiy is passionate about longevity – so much so that he’s offering a prize of $1 million to the first person to reach the age of 123 years. He himself dreams of living forever and hopes that his generous gift will trigger a new generation of ‘supercentenarians’ (people over 110 years of age).

“We live in the most exciting era of human development when technologies become exponential and transformative,” said Kaminskiy, a senior partner of Hong Kong-based firm Deep Knowledge Ventures. “They may not realise it, but some of the supercentenarians alive today may see the dawn of the next century if they live long enough for these transformative technologies to develop.”

“I hope that my prize will help some of them desire longer lifespans and make their approaches to living longer a little more competitive,” he added.

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25-year-old Jia Binhui, from Yunlong County, southwest China’s Yunnan Province, was diagnosed with blood cancer two years ago. Sadly, he is unable to afford medical treatment, but that hasn’t stopped the resilient young man from trying to get better. In a desperate attempt to rid himself of the cancerous cells plaguing his body, he’s devised an alternate treatment that involves roasting himself in his backyard!

Binhui went through an unsuccessful bone-marrow transplant procedure that cost over $80,000 and was paid for by well-wishers. But, coming from a family of poor farmers, he was unable to afford further hospital treatments.That’s when he heard about the concept of using heat to fight cancer. Read More »

Jackson Gordon, a student of industrial design at Philadelphia University, has pooled everything he’s learned at school so far to build an awesome version of Batman’s batsuit! And we’re not talking about just another replica. This one is designed to withstand punches, kicks, stabs or baseball bat blows!

“I’ve always been a Batman fan,” the 21-year-old from Wayne, Philadelphia told Buzzfeed news. He started making prototypes for the suit last September, using over $1,000 raised on Kickstarter. “Before making the real suit, I did at least 10 prototypes of different parts for the suit to test out materials and sewing patterns,” he revealed. “Once I was happy with those, I started making the real suit using the patterns I had decided on from the prototypes. I cut out the internal lining fabric, then added the foam padding, then a layer of kevlar, then the top grey fabric.”

When the individual pieces were completed, Gordon sewed them together to form the suit. He made the external armored plates from quarter-inch-thick ABS sheets, cut using a scroll saw. “These plates were then power sanded, and heated up with a heat gun to make them pliable,” he explained. “The chest and ab plating was then mounted to the suit, while the other armor remains removable.”

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A gut-wrenching video, showing a leech grow fat as it sucks blood from a man’s hand, has recently surfaced on the internet. Shockingly, the man claims that the bloodsucker is actually his pet, and that he willingly feeds it his own blood!

The identity of the man is unknown, but the video is believed to have been filmed in Japan. The leech in the footage is so bloated, it’s as big as the man’s forearm. And judging by the bite marks on his arm, the devoted owner has been feeding the creature his blood for quite some time now. Read More »

U.S. Army veteran Kinessa Johnson, who served in Afghanistan for four years, has gone from protecting humans to protecting animals. She is the latest addition to VETPAW (Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife), an organisation that enlists retired veterans to hunt down wildlife poachers in East Africa.

According to the African Wildlife Foundation, rhinos, elephants, and other types of wildlife on the continent may become extinct within our lifetime. Which is why the work that Johnson and her fellow veterans are doing is immensely important. The team arrived in Tanzania on 26 March, and quickly got down to work: “We’re going over there to do some anti-poaching, kill some bad guys, and do some good,” Johnson said.

Johnson, a former sharp-shooter from Western Washington, works as a technical advisor to anti-poaching rangers. Her job is to train park rangers and patrol with them to provide support. The training will include marksmanship, field medicine, and counter-intelligence. “Our intention is not to harm anyone; we’re here to train park rangers so they can track and detain poachers and ultimately prevent poaching,” she said. “So I patrol routinely with them and also assist in intelligence operations.”

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Photographs of an abandoned old woman living in a cave have gone viral on Chinese social media, after she was spotted there by locals. When interviewed, 52-year-old Du Meiying said that she had been living in the damp cave for two years, since her family was going through a financial crisis and could no longer support her.

Du had initially lived in a room at a council house, but had to leave the place after she had a row with her elderly neighbors. With nowhere else to go, she was forced to move into a 100-sq-meter cave on the outskirts of Yichang city, in Hubei province. The woman has managed to keep herself alive for three years by collecting rainwater to drink, cook and clean with. For food, she grows cabbages outside the cave using seeds donated by a local farmer. She’s also made a bed for herself using bamboo canes, and an abandoned wooden crate serves as her table.

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A Dutch nursing home has come up with an innovative plan to get young college kids to interact with the elderly. They’re offering small, rent-free apartments to the students, in exchange for at least 30 hours a month of spending quality time with their older neighbors.

According to the officials at Humanitas retirement home in Deventer, the students participate in a variety of activities with older residents – watching sports, celebrating birthdays, and offering company when they’re ill. It’s a unique win-win situation – the students are able to enjoy free accommodation, and it also solves the problems of isolation and loneliness among the elderly.

“It’s important not to isolate the elderly from the outside world,” explained Humanitas head Gea Sijpkes. “When you’re 96 years old with a knee problem, well, the knee isn’t going to get any better, the doctors can’t do much. But what we can do is create an environment where you forget about the painful knee. The students bring the outside world in, there is lots of warmth in the contact.”

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A head transplant is something you’re likely to come across in a far-fetched sci fi movie, as in reality, as most doctors would tell you, it is medically impossible. But a Russian man suffering from a fatal condition is willing to put his faith in the dubious procedure. In a desperate attempt to gain a new, healthy body, he’s teaming up with controversial surgeon Dr. Sergio Canavero, who claims he can cut off the man’s head and attach it on another body!

30-year-old Valeri Spiridonov has suffered all his life from Werdnig-Hoffman muscle wasting disease, a rare genetic disorder. Tragically, the disease has worsened every single day, ever since he was diagnosed with it at age one. “My muscles stopped any development in childhood,” he told the media. “Because of this, they do not grow and the skeleton gets deformed. The back muscles cannot support the skeleton.”

“I can hardly control my body now,” he added. “I need help every day, every minute. I am now 30 years old, although people rarely live to more than 20 with this disease.” Having suffered for almost three decades, Spiridonov says he now wants a chance at a new body before he dies irrespective of the risks involved. So when he heard about Canavero’s research on head transplants, he decided that he was willing to give it a shot.

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In a surprising turn of events, a doorman was recently fired from his job at a Long Island City luxury building for – get this – being too nice to the residents, proving yet again, that nice guys do seem to finish last!

41-year-old Ralph Body had been working at the building, called ‘27 on 27th’, a few blocks away from the East River, ever since it opened two years ago. He wasn’t just a regular doorman there, he went above and beyond his duties to make sure the residents were looked after. In his own words, he “gave his life” to the job.

Ralph would do anything the residents asked him to, without hesitation – right from checking on pets, to cleaning litter boxes, to watering plants. He even acted as a real-estate agent at times and showed some of the $4,200/month apartments to new tenants. “Everything I did, somebody asked me to do, or there was a need for it,” he explained.

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24-year-old New Yorker Robert Lee is one of those rare souls who give up their high flying careers, and use their business acumen to make a difference in the world. Lee is the cofounder of ‘Rescuing Leftover Cuisine’ (RLC), an initiative that makes an effort to end urban hunger by collecting wasted food from large establishments and giving it away to the poor.

Lee said that his interest in food conservation comes from his Korean immigrant parents, who insisted on clean plates and taught him never to waste food. Subsequently, he spent his college years volunteering for New York group Two Birds, One Stone, delivering extra dining hall food to homeless shelters. It was during this time that Lee realised he could streamline the system into a scalable model.

Today, Lee and his fellow ‘rescuers’ at RLC march the streets of New York City, collecting paper bags of food from restaurants and cafés that are willing to donate what they would have otherwise thrown away. The team is able to collect anywhere between five and 120 pounds of food a day, and they promptly deliver the haul to a nearby homeless shelter.

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After five long years of entrapment inside the wall of a subway station in Cairo, Egypt, a cat was finally set free last month. The poor feline was first discovered in 2010 by an elderly man known as Uncle Abdo, who heard its meows from behind the wall at Mohamed Naguib Metro station. After checking the premises, Abdo found a tiny hole and realized the cat must have crawled inside and had gotten stuck. He named the cat Biso, and made it mission to take care of it.

At first,Uncle Abdo, who owns a shop outside the station, wasn’t sure of what to do about the situation – he would have liked to break open the wall the free the cat, but that would have meant destruction of public property. So he continued to bring food and water for Biso, reaching into the hole and placing them there so that she could survive. The bizarre arrangement continued for five long years. Even during the revolution on January 25, 2011, when most stores were closed, Uncle Abdo went to the station, just to feed Biso.

“I do it for God, what is for God does not go away,” Uncle Abdo said, adding that God rids him of many problems for such good deeds.

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34-year-old Zhang Yiyi wasn’t happy with simply being called a great writer, he wanted to look the part as well. So he spent his entire life savings of 1.4 million yuan ($225,800) on plastic surgery, in order to resemble his childhood hero and role model – William Shakespeare!

The devoted superfan had a total of 10 operations – including eye reconstruction, eyelid surgery, nose surgery and a face tuck – over the span of several months. He is yet to emulate Shakespeare’s famously bald head, but he has settled for growing his hair longer, just to improve the likeness.

Interestingly, Yiyi is an accomplished writer himself, and actually used his book royalties to pay for the cosmetic procedures. But, like the English playwright, he started off poor; he was born in humble surroundings and grew up in a debt-ridden family due to his father’s failing business. Growing up, Yiyi was able to draw parallels between his own childhood and that of Shakespeare, whose father also was declared bankrupt when the playwright was a young boy.

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German fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is undoubtedly a rich man, but here’s a shocker – even his cat Choupette is richer than most people. The furry white feline managed to earn over three million dollars from just two days of modelling work. She is now believed to be the world’s most pampered cat – she has two maids, enjoys First Class travel around the world and even has her own Instagram account with hundreds of thousands of followers.

According to 81-year-old Lagerfeld, creative director of Chanel and Fendi, Choupette did two modelling assignments last year – one for Japanese cosmetics brand Shu Uemura, and the other for a Opel Corsa car calendar. Collectively, the two jobs earned her a whopping three million euro – a figure that professional supermodels might probably get paid for a much harder year’s work.

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