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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Oratilwe Hlongwane, a.k.a. DJ AJ, has become a viral phenomenon in South Africa with a dedicated fan following of thousands. But here’s the twist – he’s actually a two-year-old kid! While he can barely speak, the incredibly talented toddler can work a DJ console like a pro.

AJ is so good at DJing that he has fans hankering after his heavy-bass house music. The record spinning toddler has made a few special appearances and also bagged sponsorship deals with various brands. His most recent performance was at a shopping mall in his hometown of Johannesburg, where a large crowd gathered to groove to his music.

AJ’s mother, Refiloe Marumo, attributes the boy’s astounding skills to his father Glen Hlongwane’s decision to buy him an iPad even before he was born. Glen, a gymnastics coach, wanted to use the iPad to download educational apps to speed up the kid’s education. Incidentally, he happens to be an aspiring DJ, so he also downloaded a DJ app for his own use.

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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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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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35-year-old Debbie Taylor loves cooking big meals for her boyfriend and teenage son. But when the time comes to sit down at the table and dig in, she just pulls out a packet of Beef-flavored Monster Munch crisps instead. In fact, that’s about all she’s been eating for the past decade!

Debbie, a hotel chambermaid in Harlow, Essex, is so paranoid about food that she actually takes a packet of crisps when she goes out to restaurants, and munches on them while her boyfriend Gerald indulges in a traditional meal. She takes them everywhere. For example, when the boyfriend took her and her son Luke for a holiday in Spain, she actually packed a separate suitcase full of Monster Munch for the trip!

“I’m not a fan of the cooked meal,” she wrote in a life and style experience article in The Guardian a few years ago. “I’m much happier with Monster Munch crisps – beef flavor; I wouldn’t touch pickled onion. When I open the bag, I check if they have enough beef coating on them; if it’s not enough, I’ll throw them away.”

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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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A British Man recently spent six hours getting a tattoo of Jesus worth £250 ($370) at a tattoo shop in Luton, England and simply walked out without paying. The artist who inked him said that the man claimed to have paid another member of staff, and then slipped away during the confusion. But here’s the real shocker – not only did he avoid paying for his Jesus tattoo, he actually stole an additional £1,000 from the store!

According to Red INC owner Joanne Baum, the man already had the words ‘Only God can judge me’ tattooed on the other hand. “The irony is that he clearly decided to embrace Christianity and the major ethos is ‘Thou shalt not steal,’” Baum said. “He planned the theft from us and he completely planned not to pay for the tattoo. To have someone sit there for six hours talking about their life intimately and then do this is unbelievable. He was there chatting about his wife and daughter, it is not acceptable.”

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You could say Zhao Rui, a young Shaolin monk from China, is rather thick-skulled. In a shocking video doing the rounds online, he can be seen holding a powerful electric drill to his head, without even breaking his skin, let alone fracturing his skull. The 24-year-old Kung-Fu master can also bend an iron bar against a wall with his throat, and lie on metal spears while stones are broken against his back.

The recent display of Zhao’s skills was intended to show how he had trained his body during several years of martial arts training. He revealed that he was fascinated by martial arts as a child, and ran away from home to join a Shaolin Temple at age 16. He studied there for two years, after which he continued to learn kung fu from other masters. He is now a master himself. Read More »

When 24-year-old Christine Royles was diagnosed with failing kidneys early last year, she had to join a waiting list of over 100,000 people in the US who needed kidney transplants. When she learned that over 4,000 people die each year just waiting for their turn, she decided to take matters in her own hands. And miraculously, she found a donor all by herself – through a simple message she posted on her car window!

“I saw a story about this old man in a different state who was asking for a kidney for his wife,” the South Portland resident said. “He stood on the side of the road with a sign.” Inspired by the idea, she decided to take it to the next level – instead of standing on the road, she turned her car into a rolling billboard. “Looking for someone to donate me their kidney. Must have type O blood,” her sign read, along with her phone number.

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