Meet Dickinson Oppong, the Human Water Fountain

The average stomach has a capacity of one liter, but superhuman Dickinson Oppong, from Ghana, is able to drink up to 4.5 liters in under 90 seconds. Crazier still is his capacity to spit it all back out from his stomach, like a human water fountain.

The adult human body is between 50% and 65% water, which makes the life-giving liquid vital to our survival. But drinking too much of it in a short period of time can kill you. The kidneys are unable to flush the extra water fast enough so the excess goes into the bloodstream diluting it and causing a potentially-deadly condition known as hyponatremia. Drawn to regions of the body where the concentration of salt and other dissolved substances is higher, water leaves the blood and enters the cells, which swell up like balloons to make room. While most cells can stretch without bursting, because they are embedded in flexible tissue like fat and muscle, that is not the case of brain cells. There is almost zero room to expand inside the skull, so water-induced brain edema or swelling can be fatal. But one man’s ability defies everything medical science teaches us about the dangers of drinking too much water too fast. 46-year-old Dickinson Oppong can down over a gallon of water in just a minute and a half, an impossible feat for the average human.

Dickinson-Oppong

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Smart Billboard Produces 100 Liters of Drinking Water a Day Out of Thin Air

Researchers in Peru have teamed up with an ad agency to provide a viable solution to the problem of potable water shortage in Lima, the world’s second-largest city in the world. Their  creation is a s simple as it is ingenious – a billboard that turns air humidity into drinking water.

Located northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the world, the city of Lima and its surrounding villages get around 0.51 inches of precipitation per year. For a long time, the capital city has relied on drainage from the Andes mountains and runoff from melted glaciers for its potable water needs, but due to climate change, the water supply from both sources is on the decline. Out of the 8.5 million people living in Lima, 1.2 million lack running water completely and have to either draw water from wells, which is known to be polluted, or rely on unregulated private-company water trucks, which charge u to 20 time the normal price of tap water. Aware of this dire problem, Lima’s University of Engineering and Technology started looking for a way to solve the problem and, at the same time, draw the attention of applicants for 2013. Inspired by the fact that the city’s average air humidity is about 83%, due to its location along the Southern Pacific Ocean, UTEC partnered with advertising agency Mayo DraftFCB to create an eye-catching billboard that produces water out of thin air.

Lima-water-billboard

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Chinese Man Has Lived on Water Alone for the Last 12 Years

How long can you survive without food? It all depends on a person’s weight, overall health and metabolic rate, but according to scientific data, a human being can’t go much longer than 3 weeks without food. Now, a 22-year-old man from China means to challenge this theory claiming he has survived 12 years on water alone.

Ning Xuefa, a young man from China’s Henan province, has recently made headlines for claiming he hasn’t had a bite of food in the last 12 years. Looking at the 1.50-meter-tall, 40-kg-heavy Ning one can tell he doesn’t like to eat much, but his story seems almost impossible to believe. He told Chinese media that he completely renounced food when he was just a 10-year-old child. Just looking at bread or vegetables at the dinner table made him nauseous, and he always had a dry throat and a weird sensation like something was stuck there that made him drink lots of water all day long. He currently consumes up to 15 liters of water in a day, and his father back up his story that he never touches a single scrap of food, whether it’s rice, steamed bread or meat.

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New York Cafe Sells Only Tap Water for $2.50 a Bottle

Molecule, a newly-opened cafe in New York’s East Village, has sparked a lot of controversy when it started selling tap water for the price of $2.50 per bottle. It might sound like a scam, and many think it is just that, but the owners say the price is right for a taste of “pure H2O”.

Experts say New York’s tap water is among the safest and tastiest in the world, coming from “a watershed that is relatively pristine,” according to chemical engineer Lorraine Huchler, but some people believe it can get a lot better. Two of them, Alexander Venet and Adam Ruhf decided to actually do something about it, and opened the Molecule Cafe, in East Village, where people can buy tap water purified through a complex seven-step process. They have this $25,000 machine that uses UV light, ozone treatments, and reverse osmosis to make superior-grade water that its creators believe is worth $2.50 a bottle.

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Peruvian Mayor Says Tap Water Makes Men Gay

Be careful before taking that sip! It might just make you gay. Or so believes a Peruvian Mayor, Jose Benitez. This by far sounds like one of the most unusual and irrational beliefs associated with homosexuality. Does Mr. Mayor actually have something to back his claims? Let’s find out.

It is definitely an established fact that the drinking water in the area consists of several minerals. It is the very presence of these minerals that is causing the Mayor of Humarey to make such claims. In fact, the supply of potable water to Humarey comes from the neighboring town of Tabalosos, and this water is known to have high levels of the mineral strontium. It is interesting to note that Tabalosos has been in the news before. For none other than its high population of homosexuals. It was reported that around 14,000 gay men inhabited the town at one point of time. A correlation has been drawn between strontium and the gay population.

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Wet Monday in the Ukraine

Known as an ancient tradition, in central-European countries like Poland and the Czech Republic, Wet Monday appears to be very popular in Ukraine, as well. It takes place on the second day of Easter

Wet Monday started out, in Poland,as a pagan custom that symbolize cleansing, with the coming of Spring. When Christianity became the main religion, Wet Monday was adopted as a Christian ritual, related to cleansing souls of sins. The truth is people loved this tradition so much, they found a way to keep it, by associating it with religion.

On Wet Monday. boys and men armed with bottles and buckets of water, chase after girls and splash them from head to toe. According to the original custom, the most beautiful girl in a village would be the wettest, but nowadays, boys just splash any girl they see. At one point, the tradition got so out of hand that boys threw buckets of water, at girls, threw their car windows.

With the current water shortage the world is facing right now, some would say this is a terrible waste, but the boys with water bottles wouldn’t dream of abandoning this ancient tradition. just look at those happy faces.

The photos below were taken on Wet Monday, in the Ukrainian city of Lviv. They are copyright of  Yurko Dyachyshyn.

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