The tiny Lone Star tick can succeed where countless health experts and diet planners have failed – this bug has the power to put people off red meat! The tick isn’t vegetarian itself, but it sure can turn you into one for life.

Scientifically known as Amblyomma americanum, these ticks carry a variety of diseases, but what makes them truly fascinating is their ability to make people allergic to meat. That’s because they carry a substance called alpha-gal (Galactose-alpha-1,3-galactose), which is a type of carbohydrate found in non-primate mammals. Now, alpha-gal isn’t present in the human body, but our guts can digest it without negative effects under normal conditions. So when we eat meat that contains alpha-gal, we’re able to handle it without any problems.

But when the stuff enters the bloodstream through the Lone Star’s bite, it’s a totally different ballgame – the human immune system recognizes it as a foreign substance and produces antibodies to protect against it. These antibodies remain in the system, so the next time meat containing alpha-gal is ingested, it can trigger violent allergic reactions.

Read More »

Meet Evan, a cute little 8-year-old with the world’s best job. He rakes in hundreds of thousands of dollars while doing what all kids do – playing with toys. He is the face of EvanTubeHD, a family-friendly YouTube channel that reviews toys and video games. Evan’s videos regularly exceed a million views and the channel earns him a whopping $1.3 million a year.

This is one of those internet success stories that make you wonder, “Why didn’t I think of that?” It started out as a playful project between Evan and his father Jared – they would make stop-motion videos using clay models of Angry Birds. “When we started, we were making about a video per month as a fun little project,” Jared recalled. “It was interesting to see who was tuning in.”

The videos were so cute that they started to get really popular, and when their first video hit 1 million views, Jared realized how huge it was getting. It wasn’t long before the channel became a serious business model. “By doing toy reviews that are a bit ‘out of the box’, we try to provide information about the product as well as have that creative flair,” he said.

Read More »

Israeli-born fashion designer Elie Tahari has created an ‘iPhone Dress’ as a way of paying tribute to Apple’s latest product offering. While the design of the dress is a very basic black silhouette, it is made of a special mesh ‘techno-fabric’ that allows over 50 iPhones to be sewn into it.

The iPhone Dress isn’t exactly what you’d call wearable, but Tahari’s intention was to make a statement about the fusion of fashion and technology, and to honor the iPhone 6. “I’m inspired by the iPhone,” he said. “I’ve always been. The only device I really have is an iPhone.”

Read More »

We’ve seen lots of bizarre plastic surgery stories in the past, but this one surpasses them all – a 21-year-old woman went and got herself a third breast! It’s so ridiculous that I won’t blame you for thinking it’s a prank, but she says it’s not. She got a fake breast implanted in between her two natural ones, and even started going by the name ‘Jasmine Tridevil’ to reflect the change.

Why would anyone in their right mind do this to themselves, you ask? It turns out that Jasmine, a massage therapist by profession, wants to earn a bit of fame and money and if getting a third boob is what it takes to accomplish her goals, then so be it. She’s created a little reality show around her life called ‘Jasmine’s Jugs’ and she’s hoping that MTV will pick up the idea.

In the meantime, Jasmine has turned to YouTube, hoping to gain an army of followers. She’s put up a few videos in the past couple of months flaunting her new look and answering her viewer’s incredulous questions. Going by her responses, it looks like she actually wants hate comments and extreme reactions. Read More »

In a bid to raise fitness consciousness, Moscow’s authorities have decided to replace ordinary park benches with high-tech scales. The change, which will affect the city’s most popular parks, is being sponsored by gyms that are hoping to attract more weight-obsessed clients.

A similar campaign is already in place at a public bus stop in the Netherlands, where benches are attached to large electronic panels that display the seated person’s weight in kilograms. The panels also feature nutrition-related information and gym advertisements.

One of the first parks in Moscow to embrace the change is the northern Sokolniki Park – director Andrei Lapshin said that 20 weighing benches could be placed there by the end of the year.

Read More »

It’s that time of the year again when people do the stupidest things to get their hands on Apple’s latest iPhone. It’s been pretty crazy so far, but this story is a clear winner – a Chinese student is offering to share his girlfriend with anyone who will pay up in cash. He plans to use all the money his girlfriend earns him to pay for the highly coveted iPhone 6.

The kid recently stood outside Shanghai’s Songjiang University, holding up a sign that read: ‘Girlfriend Sharing’. To avoid being misunderstood, he also stated the ‘rules’ quite clearly. The deal, he wrote, included eating together, studying together, playing games, saving seats (in libraries/classrooms) or going on dates. The sign was pretty clear on one thing – ‘no funny business’.

“Sharing girlfriend for pocket money,” the sign read. “If you are interested, connect to personal hotspot ‘wifi sharing master’  to check out the girlfriend.”

Read More »

Like many girls her age, 25-year-old Lauren Adkins has a huge crush on vampire Edward Cullen from the Twilight movies, played by Hollywood heartthrob Robert Pattinson. But Lauren has taken her infatuation to a whole new level – she actually got married to a life-size cardboard cut-out of her perfect man. She lives with the cut-out, goes on dates with it, and pretty much considers it her partner for life.

Lauren, from Las Vegas, said that she’s been obsessed with romantic fairytale endings ever since she was a little girl. “When I was a child, I watched the Disney versions of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs and Cinderella until the tapes wore out,” she recalled. As she grew older, her interests shifted towards romantic teen movies, like Twilight.

After every guy she met and dated at college failed to meet her ideal of Prince Charming, she finally found what she was looking for in Edward Cullen. “It was different from any love story I’d ever seen before – after all, the leading character was as likely to suck your blood as open the door for you. I was obsessed.”

Read More »

‘Netropolitan’ is a new social networking website that caters exclusively to the ultra-rich. Described as ‘the online country club for people with more money than time’, the website costs a whopping $9,000 to join. And that’s just the initiation fee; there’s also an annual membership fee of $3,000.

That sounds like an exorbitant amount, considering the fact that popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter are free of charge. The whole thing almost sounds like a prank, but Netropolitan founder James Touchi-Peters assures us that the service is quite real.

“This is 100 percent real, and I believe there is a need and an audience for this service,” said Touchi-Peters, 48, a composer and former conductor of the Minnesota Philharmonic Orchestra. He got the idea for Netropolitan when he had trouble relating to the people he met on other social websites.

Read More »

A man from China’s Sichuan Province wants a mother so badly that he’s offering one million yuan (a little over US$160,000) to any woman willing to take on the role. Kuan-Yin Tsui, who is in his 30s, has become an internet sensation in China, following his bizarre proposition.

Eye-witnesses say that he was actually seated at Fanghu Park with a bowl of banknotes in front of him, in the hopes of finding a mother. Behind him was a red lantern with his phone number plastered on it, and a large poster that displayed his terms – he wanted his would-be mother to be a woman who was at least 57 years old, well educated, and without a history of drug use. The final decision, he wrote, would depend on whether he felt a ‘connection’ with any of his applicants.

Juan Lei, who happened to be visiting the park at the same time, took pictures of the entire affair and posted them online. “I went to speak to him to ask if it was a real offer, and he told me I was too young for the job and he only wanted older women,” she recalled.

Read More »

Joe is a crafty young homeless man in New York who hooks up with a different woman each night just to avoid sleeping out in the cold. The 26-year-old serial charmer has managed to lure hundreds of women into inviting him to spend the night with them. Originally from Boston, Joe says that he loves New York because it has 8 million people, and he can be with a different girl whenever he wants.

“Dude I’ll go up to any random girl and tell them I love them, I wanna marry ‘em – just for recreational purposes,” he bragged. Joe isn’t exactly the definition of handsome, but his confidence and arrogance seem to be serving him quite well. And his homeless status doesn’t really stop him from trying to look good.

Read More »

29-year-old Koichi Kuwabara has made it his mission to distribute ‘Free Hugs for Peace’ to as many people as he can – he’s been traveling across Asia for the past three years, hugging random people on the streets. His videos have gone viral on YouTube, garnering over 1.5 million views. He also has over 5,300 followers on Facebook and about 3,000 on Twitter.

Koichi, an aspiring school teacher, said: “I don’t want to just regurgitate theories written on textbooks. I want to tell the kids what I saw and learned first-hand from giving free hugs worldwide.”

He began his extraordinary adventure in August, 2011, just after he graduated from university. Since then, he has taken his Free Hugs initiative to several cities in China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan. At each location he visiyed, Koichi held up a sign that displayed the flags of Japan and the country he was visiting, along with the caption ‘Free Hugs for Peace’.

Read More »

Of all the unusual ways to get a massage, this has got to be the weirdest one. 51-year-old Li Chia rolls himself down 30 concrete steps every morning at Xi’an Changle Park. Once he gets to the bottom, he rocks himself back up to the top again without getting up, using a careful, self-taught technique. He claims that by doing this he receives a thorough massage that addresses all the pressure points in his body.

“I got the idea from rolling on pebbles at a health club, and when I couldn’t find any pebbles at my local park, I decided to try the stairs and was surprised to find it really works,” Chia explained. “I have always been a great fan of Chinese massage and the possibility that pressure points can do all sorts of things including relieving stress. After all, that’s why massage is so popular,” he said. “However, I don’t believe that any masseuse will be able to give me the sort of massage I get from the impact of the stairs. I find it’s a great way to relieve pressure and has all sorts of other health benefits as well.”

Read More »

Cathy Price, from Preston, Lancashire, has paid a visit to 500 different pubs named ‘Red Lion’ in Britain. In fact, she’s made it her life’s mission to visit every single Red Lion in the UK, which just happens to be the most common pub name in the country. She celebrated her 500th visit last weekend in Bedfordshire, where she visited a Red Lion at Dagnall, near Whipsnade Zoo.

55-year-old Cathy has been touring the nation since 2011, visiting local Red Lions in Milton Bryan, Studham, Upper Sundon, Leighton Buzzard, Great Brickhill and Houghton Regis. She said that she got the idea for the project on a whim: “I was away in the Lake District for the weekend a few years ago and I was watching the Grand National at a pub and I read a sign which said the Red Lion was the most common pub name in the country.”

“I thought they must be absolutely everywhere and that was when I decided I had to see them all,” she explained. “I began on Grand National day, April 9, 2011, and aim to complete the quest as near to Grand National day as I can next year, which will have taken four years.”

Read More »

Dr. Jeff Wilson, a professor of environmental science at a university in Austin, Texas, is living in a 33-square-foot dumpster for a year. He kickstarted the unique project in February, and his efforts have earned him the nickname ‘Professor Dumpster’ among his students. Harvard-educated Wilson says that his goal is to show people that it is possible to have a pretty good life even in austere conditions.

The dark green dumpster is currently parked behind the women’s residence halls in a corner of Huston-Tillotson University’s campus. Wilson describes it as ‘the most thoughtfully designed, tiniest home ever constructed’. Before he moved in, Wilson’s students cleaned and fixed the dumpster for him, making sure that it wasn’t smelly or unfit for living. And to make the dwelling as energy efficient as possible, they plan to set up solar panels and an energy producing toilet.

Having previously lived in a sprawling 2,500 square foot house, Wilson started downsizing his life after going through a divorce. He moved into a 500 square foot apartment, and sold all his spare clothes and furniture for $1 per item. He soon realized how little he needed to survive, and dumpster-living sounded like a great idea.

Read More »

For several months, master impersonator and conman Jeison Neck Jair Garcia managed to fool Colombian authorities into believing that he was a diplomat from Lebanon. Originally from the city of Valledupar, in Colombia, Jeison posed as a fake Lebanese ambassador named Jason Abdulaziz Al Hakim Ali Nayb, using only a couple of fake IDs and his native wit.

Jeison managed to keep up the charade for months, living in style and enjoying all the comforts that come with being a foreign dignitary. He stayed at the best hotels and dined at exclusive restaurants until his game was finally up. When he was caught, he insisted that he was only playing a prank and that his intention was never to ‘hurt anyone’.

It’s really surprising that Jeison managed to convince so many people that he was a diplomat for so long, without anyone calling his bluff. He used two fake cards – one identifying him as Ambassador of the Republic of Lebanon, and the other issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Colombia. Strangely enough, nobody bothered to check the authenticity of the documents or even contact the Lebanese embassy about his credentials.

Read More »