Brazilian model Mauricio Galdi is the newest addition to the growing band of surgically-enhanced men branded ‘Human Ken Dolls’. After a total of eight procedures in the past decade, his face now looks like that of the popular plastic doll. Mauricio, 27, claims that he wasn’t actually aiming for the ‘Ken’ look, but now that the media’s given him the title, he doesn’t mind cashing in on the publicity. “I never sought out to be the Brazilian human Ken,” he said. “It was something that came to me, television sought to give me that title.” We find that kind of hard to believe though, given the fact that he’s been obsessed with dolls since childhood. Growing up in a middle class household in Sao Paulo, Mauricio confessed that he often felt jealous of little girls because it was socially acceptable for them to play with Barbie and Ken. “I saw them playing with dolls and I wanted to do the same,” he admitted, “but I never did for fear of prejudice.” Read More »

Let’s face it: fire drills are boring and they do nothing to prepare you for a real disaster. Recognising the need for some serious training, a school in China recently collaborated with the local fire department to take traditional fire drills to the next level. During the mandatory annual event hosted by Nanhu Vocational School, in Hongkou District, Shanghai, students had to evacuate the building at the sound of a bell. But they also had to run through a series of burning doorways with napkins over their mouths, to avoid smoke inhalation. After crossing the obstacles, the students used fire extinguishers to put off the flames. Over 1,000 students from different grades attended the course. Read More »

Contact lenses seem harmless, but they can cause the eyes some serious damage, something that 18-year-old Jessica Greaney learned the hard way. She was nearly left blind last month, when a parasite burrowed into her eye and started feeding on her cornea, all because of a contaminated lens. When Jessica first noticed that her eyelid was drooping, she thought she just had a minor infection. The young girl visited the hospital, where doctors told her it was an ulcer, but in spite of using medication for a week, her symptoms didn’t go away. In fact, they steadily worsened. “By the end of the week, my eye was bulging, and it looked like a huge red golf ball,” Jessica told student newspaper The Tab. “It was swollen, and extremely painful, and they admitted me into hospital. Read More »

Meet Li Li Juan, a former millionaire whose benevolent spirit led her to bankruptcy. The 47-year-old, from northern China’s Hebei Province, has adopted 72 abandoned children over the course of 19 years. She spent all her money caring for them, and is now facing a huge debt of over two million yuan. Li became rich during the 1980s, earning huge profits from her garments business and her investments in iron ore mining. It was around this time that she started taking in sick and disabled children who were abandoned by their parents, and orphaned children whose parents had died in coal mine disasters. She used her two sources of income to provide for all her adopted children. It was all smooth sailing for a few years, but as luck would have it, hard times fell upon Li in 2008. Her mine was shut down due to urban developments, cutting down a major source of her income. But she continued to care for the children by selling off all her properties and valuables, one at a time. Read More »

For nearly four decades, Mark Gubin has been playing an epic prank on people flying into his hometown. As aircrafts descend into Milwaukee’s Mitchell International airport, passengers are greeted with a warm, welcoming sign: ‘Welcome to Cleveland’! Gubin says that the sign – painted on the roof of his apartment in six-foot letters – has always succeeded at giving flyers a good scare. “There’s no real purpose for having this here except madness,” he told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2005. “Which I tend to be pretty good at.” The retired photographer revealed that he first got the idea for the sign from his assistant, when he was having lunch with her up on his roof in 1978. She had noticed all the low-flying planes in the area, and told him it would be nice to make a sign to welcome people to Milwaukee. But then Gubin came up with an even better idea – a sign welcoming them to the wrong city. Read More »

The parents of an African American civil rights leader in Eastern Washington state have shocked the nation by declaring that their daughter isn’t black, as she has claimed to be for the last 10 years. In several recent interviews with the media, Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal revealed that their daughter Rachel is actually caucasian. “She’s our birth daughter and we’re both of European descent,” Larry told news reporters. “We’re very puzzled and it’s very sad.” Since January, Rachel has been the president of the Spokane County chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). She is also chair of the city’s police oversight commission, and an adjunct professor of African studies at Eastern Washington University. Rachel is currently estranged from her parents – they claim that they only found out about her disguise when they read about her in a newspaper a few years ago. Read More »

A couple of teen geniuses from Hong Kong have invented a product that could revolutionize the world of hygiene and infection control. They’ve created a door handle that instantly destroys germs every time it is touched by human hands. The two kids – 17-year-old Sun Ming (‘Simon’) Wong and 18-year-old King Pong (‘Michael’) Li – are students at Tam Lee Lai Fun Memorial Secondary School, in Tuen Mun, China. They realised that everyday objects such as doorknobs, handrails, shopping cart handles, and counter-tops are breeding grounds for millions of germs, so they set out to explore the possibility of creating self-disinfecting surfaces that remain germ-free all the time. After considerable research, Simon and Michael found out that titanium dioxide is an amazing bacteria-killer. So they ground the mineral into a very fine powder to use as a coating for the handle. They also discovered that titanium dioxide is more effective when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) rays. This posed a challenge: sunlight is a natural source of UV rays, but door handles are generally used indoors. So they had to come up with an energy-efficient artificial source of UV rays. Read More »

In a brilliant use of social media, a news show in Panama City gave potholes in the streets their own voices on Twitter. The crew of Telemetro Reporta installed motion-sensitive devices in craters across the city, programmed to tweet authorities every time cars ran over them, until they fixed the problem! The makers of the show said that they wanted to highlight how horrible the roads of the city had become. Despite having one of the fastest growing economies of Central and South America and a concentration on skyscrapers that earned it the nickname ‘Dubai of Latin America’, Panama City’s streets were pockmarked with holes and ditches that made every commute a nightmare. “It would seem that in a rush to build a modern city, Panama forgot to take care of its existing streets, creating a contradiction of modern buildings and damaged streets,” the show’s promo declares. “This is not amusing for the people that drive on the streets every day.” Read More »

In a bid to get African youth interested in current affairs, Newz Beat, a Ugandan original news program features ‘rap-orters’ who rap headlines to hip hop beats. Hip-hop is probably the last thing you’d expect to hear when listening to a news bulletin, which is exactly what makes Newz Beat so intriguing. Yahoo news reports that the show is quite relevant in Uganda, where the press faces lots of problems with censorship, and the youth aren’t too interested in what’s happening around them. A program that features ‘rap-orters’ instead of traditional anchors is actually quite refreshing. The offbeat show consists of five-minute episodes aired every Saturday on NTV, just before the station’s traditional news bulletin. Each episode covers about four regional and international stories and is recorded in both English and the local language, Luganda. The show is broadcast on air, but since over 90% of Ugandan households don’t have electricity, Newz Beat is also distributed through video halls, where people can get together and watch it. Read More »

A Japanese man and his adorable pet tortoise have become internet sensations after photos of them strolling along the streets of Tokyo went viral. The man – funeral director Mitani Hisao – revealed that the tortoise has been his pet for the past 19 years, taking the place of the child he never had. Hisao added that the African spurred tortoise was a tiny baby, only five cm in diameter, when he first spotted it in a pet-store window. “I never had any children, but 19 years ago my wife caught the eyes of this little tortoise and felt an instant bond with him,” he said. “I couldn’t leave the store without it.” So they adopted the little creature, named it Bon-chan, and cared for it as they would a child. Read More »

If you’re passionate about breaking high-tech stuff, we may have found the job of your dreams. Believe it or not, a UK-based cell phone comparison website currently has a vacancy for ‘Mobile Phone Destruction Tester’, a part time position that pays £36,500 (nearly $55,00) a year! The ideal candidate for the job would be someone who loves mobile tech, and has a “long history of destruction, particularly in the field of mobile phones,” the listing on TigerMobiles.com mentions. “We want you to take the latest smartphones and put them through their paces in real world scenarios. Drop them in the bath, stomp them in the mosh pit, accidentally dip them in your Chicken Vindaloo.” However, candidates would also have to be good with written and spoken English, and familiar with using computers, because “there has to be some boring part to the job.” Read More »

Swedish start-up dvarg.se is attracting criticism for renting out people with dwarfism to corporate events and private parties, for entertainment purposes. Some of the controversial services include ‘dwarf-boxing’ and ‘dwarf-bartenders’, priced at 4,000 kronor each, and ‘dwarf-bodyguards’ priced at 5,000 kronor per dwarf. Clients can also hire dwarves for customized services, at 1,000 kronor per hour. The ethics of such services are obviously questionable, and the company has been accused of setting a bad example to the nation’s youth. But dvarg.se CEO and founder Johannes Erikkson insists that there’s nothing wrong with what his company is offering. “We cater for everything from nightclubs to bachelor parties,” he said. “Last weekend we had a request for some of our employees to kidnap a guy at a bachelor party.” However, the company did remove a service called ‘dwarf-tossing’ from the website, after it was reported in the national media. Read More »

Chinese student Long Yi recently made a small fortune selling quilts used by female students to their male admirers on campus. The idea sounds creepy, but Long said that he was inspired by a female graduate who sold her own quilt within minutes of posting it online. He quickly did the math and realised that the market was potentially worth thousands of yuan. So he spent his savings on dozens of old quilts belonging to female students who are graduating this year from Qinghua University, where Long is a junior. Next, Long posted all the quilts online, and managed to sell a major chunk of them in just one day, raking in a whopping 10,000 yuan (US $1,600). In fact, the demand is so high that he has set up a live stall on campus to complement his online sales. Believe it or not, lovestruck young men are lining up for the chance to cuddle with quilts that once belonged to the women of their dreams. Read More »

In 2013, Chinese surgeon Xiaoping Ren conducted a historic surgery: he basically sliced the head off one mouse and attached it to the body of another. Believe it or not, the grotesque creature he had created actually survived for a few minutes – it opened its eyes, and even managed to breathe on its own. The operation was hailed a success, and since then, the eccentric doctor and his team have conducted head transplants on over 1,000 mice! With each operation, Dr. Ren has tried to perfect his procedure by using tiny tubes to carry oxygenated blood from the mice’s brains to their new bodies. After over 1,000 transplants, the results are not very encouraging – after the procedure, the mice open their eyes, breathe on their own and even show signs of movement, but so far, every one of them has died within a day. That sounds scary and even unethical, but Dr. Ren is so motivated by his modest success that he wants to continue experimenting on other creatures. According to a Wall Street Journal report, he’s planning to conduct head transplants on monkeys next, hoping to create the first head-transplanted primate that can live and breathe on its own, ‘at least for a little while’. Read More »

A lovestruck 20-year-old recently made headlines after he was caught sneaking into an examination hall dressed like a girl. When questioned, Ayan Zhademov confessed that he was trying to take the exam on behalf of his 17-year-old girlfriend! Ayan revealed that his lady friend was totally stressed over the Unified National Testing, an exam used for college admissions in Kazakhstan. He tried to calm her down and encourage her, but positive talk didn’t work. So he decided to impersonate her and take the exam in her place. Read More »