Austrian scientists have invented a revolutionary product in the world of prosthetics – an artificial leg with lifelike sensations. The one-of-a-kind man-made limb has sensors fitted to the sole, which are able to stimulate nerves at the base of the amputee’s stump.

“It feels like I have a foot again,” said Wolfang Rangger, the very first recipient of the sensory-enhanced prosthesis. “I no longer slip on ice and I can tell whether I walk on gravel, concrete, sand, or grass. I can even feel small stones.”

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 »

Natalia Trukhina is a professional powerlifter from Russia. At just 23-years of age, she has already accomplished more than other athletes do in their entire careers, setting multiple bench press and armlifting world records as well as earning several world champion titles.

Natalia discovered her passion for powerlifting when she was 14 years old. She had always liked power and combat sports and was a very active child. However, she weighed only 40 kilograms at the time and started hitting the gym in order to gain a few extra pounds. The rest, as they say, is history. Now 23, Natalia Trukhina has grown from a scrawny girl into one of the most muscular women in the world. Her impressive figure and strength put most men to shame.

Read More »

Rajendra Singh is considered a hero in the state of Rajasthan, in India, for single handedly reviving five rivers that had been dried up for decades. His exceptional work and dedication have earned him the nickname ‘Waterman of India’.

Singh, who studied Ayurvedic medicine at college, had always dreamed of becoming a farmer. So when he moved to Rajasthan’s Alwar district after graduating in 1985, he was interested in healing not just his people, but also the semi-arid region’s ailing ecosystem.

Singh noticed that the district’s population was dwindling – most villagers had left their homes after the local Arvari River had dried up in the ’40s, and the only people who remained were either too old or too poor to move elsewhere. Singh, driven by a strong desire to help the villagers, took on the task of bringing water back to those lands.

Read More »

Drone racing is a mushrooming trend in Australia, catering to a growing band of enthusiasts looking to fulfill their need for speed. The races, organised by underground ‘leagues’, generally take place in rundown warehouses, farms, and go-kart tracks in the fringe suburbs of various cities.

The relatively unknown sport is called FPV (first person racing). Participants spend countless hours custom building their quadcopters, fitting them with onboard cameras and ‘blinging’ them up with LED lights. During the actual events, racers don special goggles – sometimes held together with gaffer tape – to give them a drone’s-eye view as they steer their machines around the course. So it’s a lot like video gaming, except players get to control a real device instead of a virtual one.

“It’s addictive. It’s like playing a video game,” says drone racer Darren French, who has clocked over 60 kmph. “It’s fast. The more you do it, the more you want to fly.”

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 »

Matilda the cat is well on her way to becoming an internet sensation, thanks to her large, glassy, ‘alien’ eyes. Her mysterious appearance has earned her over 33,000 followers on Instagram and that number is about to skyrocket now that her photos have gone viral.

Sadly, Matilda’s story isn’t as amusing as it seems. The two-year-old tabby suffers from a rare condition that’s only getting worse as she grows older. Matilda’s anonymous owners, who refer to themselves as her ‘servants’, have revealed that she used to be pretty normal as a kitten, with the exception of having a ‘squinty eye’ from time to time.

“Matilda lives with her loving servants who include The Bearded Man, The Lady and Dog,” the servants write on Matilda’s official site. “She was born on Valentine’s Day in 2013 in a hoarder house in a small town, and was quickly picked up by a rescue society. When she found her forever home she was only 12 weeks old and the cutest, teensiest thing that anyone had ever seen.”

Read More »

You’re going to have a hard time convincing yourself that the woman in these photos isn’t Britney Spears. In fact, it isn’t a woman at all! It’s actually a man named Derrick Barry, who’s making a living out of impersonating the world-famous celebrity.

It all started a few years ago, when Derrick dressed up as Britney for Halloween. The resemblance was so striking that his friends and family were stupefied. They later told him that he should consider a career as her professional lookalike. And that’s exactly what he did..

The 31-year-old says that he finds it “amazing” to pay tribute to someone he’s idolized since the beginning of her career. “I think even if I wasn’t impersonating her I would still be such a huge fan,” he told Las Vegas Weekly. “I really have the most amazing job in the world. To be a fan of hers and then get to impersonate her around the world is such an honor.”

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 »

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 »

70-year-old master craftsman Fangze Yu can bring mythical creatures to life using nothing but straw. His most recent piece of work is an impressive dragon that he hand-crafted out of 83,600 pieces of rice straw!

Mr. Yu and his daughter spent four months working on the dragon at his workshop in China’s Jiangxi province. He started by creating a bamboo frame to support the structure. He then painstakingly assembled individual pieces of straw, using 10 different knitting and weaving techniques, to complete the 28-m, 35-kg masterpiece.

Read More »

Meet Roger, the alpha male at the Kangaroo Sanctuary in Alice Springs, Australia. When he’s not too busy fighting off younger males for the title of supreme leader, Roger likes to show off his muscles and practice his kickboxing moves.

If you’re an aspiring bodybuilder desperate enough to accept tips from a kangaroo, you should know his favorite training exercise is crushing his metal feed bucket with his bare paws. Sure, it sounds extreme, but just look at Roger’s guns!

You can tell he knows he looks good, too. The way he flexes for the camera and stares menacingly into the lens, he’s a natural superstar.

Read More »

A group of football fans in Zhenzhou, China, have literally taken football to new heights by building their very own 900-square-meter pitch on the roof of a car park building, right in the city center.

XuGong, the mastermind behind this impressive undertaking, told Chinese media that he has been a huge football fan since childhood, but growing up in Zhengzhou city, he always had problems finding a venue to practice his favorite sport. The only available one was located too far away and he could only use it once a week. After nearly a decade of frustration, Xu decided to fix the problem by building a pitch of his own. He convinced his friends and fellow football fans to pool all their savings into building their very own football field, but finding a piece of land in their busy city was a huge challenge. After months of searching, they came up with the genius idea on the roof of a building.

Read More »

According to a recent report by state media, 96.7% of all counterfeit bills circulating in China originated from templates hand-drawn by Peng Daxiang, an elderly painter who was arrested in 2013.

Before being apprehended by police, 73-year-old Daxiang, a native of Shantou, Guangdong Province, had single-handedly managed to produce dozens of printing plates worth millions of yuan without the use of computers or other modern technology. Instead, he relied on simple tools like magnifying glasses and film cameras. He apparently made huge profits selling these templates to counterfeiting gangs, charging anywhere between 50,000 yuan ($8,000) and 120,000 yuan ($20,000) per plate.

Officials later discovered that Daxiang, a famous artist in his hometown, was also involved in forging graduate diplomas, official certificates and even food stamps. He was finally sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014, by the Shantou Intermediate People’s Court, on multiple charges including counterfeiting money and forging official documents. All of his possessions were confiscated by the state and he was deprived of political rights for life.

Read More »

Here comes the bride, all dressed in white and laying in… a coffin? Yes, that’s exactly how 58-year-old Jenny Buckleff arrived at her off-the-wall wedding – in a closed coffin, pulled by a motorcycle!

Jenny, who used to work as an embalmer at a funeral parlor, said that she wanted do “something different” at her wedding. “Instead of turning up in a horse-drawn cart, I thought I’m going to turn up in a coffin,” she said. So she decided to conceal herself in her brother Roger’s black coffin, while her sister-in-law Hayley pulled her all the way to the Llangefni registry office behind a VW Trike.

Interestingly, Jenny revealed that she isn’t actually into any bizarre or goth stuff. “I don’t normally dress like this and I’m not goth at all,” she told the media. “I work for Bet365, so you have to be well presented and I’m normally very smart. But my brother is different. He’s covered in tattoos so for once he looked the part. My brother and I are very close so it was nice to be able to do something to honour him and do something a bit different. He loved it and said it made his day.” Read More »