Romanian woman Ortansa Pascariu is the proud owner of a very unusual piece of wardrobe – a vest made of her own hair! Ortansa had been collecting fallen strands of her hair for 20 years, and when she thought she had enough, she decided to use it for a unique garment.

The 65-year-old revealed that she started collecting her hair in accordance with a tradition followed in her hometown of Stauceni, in the north-eastern part of Romania. The practice suggests that women should never throw away their hair if they want to retain their beauty and good luck.

“I heard from elderly friends that women should not throw their lost hair away after combing,” she said. “They need to keep it. If not, the elderly say, it is as if you are throwing away your beauty. I started gathering my hair when I was 40 and by the age of 60 I had managed to gather one kilo, which was as much as I needed for a vest.”

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Three decades after locking eyes with the woman of his dreams, a British man is finally trying to track her down. It was in 1986 that Vernon Burton briefly glanced at a beautiful woman while traveling on a double-decker bus in the New Forest area of southern England. Most people would forget such a fleeting encounter, but Burton never quite managed to put the mystery woman out of his mind and is now looking for her everywhere.

Vernon, aged 62, was born and grew up in Hythe, a small town on the south coast of Kent. He moved to Canada in the 1970s for work but briefly returned to the UK in 1986 for a holiday. He boarded the top deck of a Solent Blue Line bus from Mousehole Lane to Southampton city center, which is when he made eye contact with a woman on the top deck of another bus headed in the opposite direction.

“For some reason I looked back at that other bus and saw a woman looking back at me,” Vernon recalled. “I came over all light-headed, my stomach felt like it had butterflies and my legs started to shake. The buses started to pull away and I just had to reach my hand out to try not to let her go. To my surprise, she did the same.”

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A Brooklyn-based personal trainer spent three months systematically wrecking his perfectly toned physique, just so he could accompany his client on her weight loss journey. The duo were featured on the third episode of a new A&E show titled Fit to Fat to Fit.

Having struggled with a food addiction only a few years back, going on this new unhealthy regime was a huge challenge for 35-year-old Adonis Hill. But he did it anyway by stopping exercise and gorging on donuts at breakfast, hot dogs and pizza at lunch, McDonald’s at dinner, and Oreos in between. He stopped gaining weight in the third month, so he added a gallon of soda a day to his diet, a move that sent him to the ER with high blood pressure.

Doctors warned Hill that he was doing serious damage to his body, but he had already put on 69 pounds by then, thanks to the 8,000-odd calories he was consuming per day. He was finally ready to take up the Fit to Fat to Fit challenge along with his client Alissa Kane, an overweight teacher. Together they quit junk food, but stayed on a high-fat, high-protein, low-carb diet in order to burn fat. They spent an hour lifting weights and an hour on cardio about five to six days a week. After four months, Hill managed to lose 57 pounds, while Kane lost 58.

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In a miraculous turn of events, a refugee cat that got separated from his family while fleeing Iraq has not only survived the treacherous sea voyage to Lesbos, but has also been reunited with his owners, now living in Norway.

Kindness towards animals is not new to the people of Lesbos – we’d previously written about a café in the Greek island that opens its doors to stray dogs at night. So when volunteers found the poor, frightened cat all alone in November last year, they took him in, naming him Dias and deciding to care for him until his real owners could be found.

A few volunteers recalled that there had been a refugee family that was separated from their pet cat on reaching Lesbos a week earlier, so they began their hunt by putting up posters at reception centers all over the island. They also set up a Facebook page called ‘Reunite Dias’ to help spread the word. In the meantime, Dias was left in the care of volunteers Amy Shrodes and Ashley Anderson, who had been working with refugees on the island.

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After three years of isolation on a remote island, Ponso the chimp finally received a visitor this year – Estelle Raballand, director of the Chimpanzee Conservation Center. The lonely chimp’s happiness was obvious from his ear-to ear-grin and the way he almost immediately hugged Estelle when she reached out to him.

Ponso’s tragic story began thirty years ago, when he was abandoned off Africa’s Ivory Coast along with 65 other chimpanzees. These chimps, most of which were captured in the wild, were used by the New York Blood Center (NYBC) for hepatitis research. During the testing phase they were reportedly biopsied, anesthetized, and chained by their necks to jungle gyms. After the tests were complete, the lab left the chimps on various remote islands with no natural source of food, occasionally dropping off supplies.

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‘Barndominiums’ are becoming a major home improvement trend in North Texas, thanks to Morton Buildings, a construction company that specializes in converting ordinary barns into luxurious dwellings. They started in the year 2000, and they have since transformed thousands of barns and sheds across the US into beautiful mansions.

Paul and Judy Pogue, from McKinney, Texas, are the proud owners of two of the most amazing barndominiums made by Morton – one in their hometown and a 10-bedroom one in Oklahoma. The one in McKinney, a 6,600 square-foot steel structure, looks rather boring from the outside, but the inside is simply breathtaking. The old barn is finished with hard wood walls and floors, leather furnishings, chandeliers, a bar, kitchen, and all the other comforts of a luxury home.

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18-year-old Malachi Love-Robinson, from West Palm Beach, Florida, was arrested last week for pretending to be a medical doctor. The teenager had opened a medical practice of his own in a professional medical building at 4700 North Congress Ave., where he swindled patients for thousands of dollars before he was caught and arrested.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first time Love-Robinson has tried posing as a doctor. In January last year he was caught impersonating a gynecologist in an exam room at St. Mary’s Medical Center. Then 17, he happened to be wearing a coat with the clinic’s logo, a face mask, and a stethoscope. The staff at the clinic were flabbergasted and later recalled seeing him roaming the halls for at least a month before the incident.

“I’ve been in practice for 36 years, this is the first time something like this has happened,” Dr. Sebastian Kent, OB GYN at the center, told the Sun Sentinel. “It’s strange. Very, very strange.”

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You might think it ridiculous and even dangerous to put dogs behind the yoke of a plane and let them try to fly it, but that won’t stop some people from trying. Case in point, Dogs Might Fly, a new TV show from the UK that plans to train some dogs to fly a plane.

While the internet has plenty of videos of dogs driving cars, planes are an entirely different matter. The sheer number of things that could go wrong makes it sound like a foolhardy exercise, but it’s a risk the makers of the show are willing to take in a bid to demonstrate that dogs have “distinct personalities and incredible levels of intelligence.”

“People give up on them too easily and this series will show us why we shouldn’t,” presenter Jamie Theakston told The Telegraph. “They are just as deserving and just as intelligent. Even if a dog has been deprived of human contact or has been badly treated, it is just as able and motivated to initiate a new relationship with a human very quickly.”

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New Zealander Danielle Daals is taking up a 30-day ‘Living like Lolita’ bathtub challenge in Miami to protest the captivity of a killer whale named Lolita. For the next one month, the 29-year-old activist will sit in a bathtub from 10am to 7pm outside Miami Seaquarium, in order to represent Lolita’s plight. Since 1970, the 22-foot whale  nicknamed ‘the world’s loneliest orca’ has been confined to a 60x80x20 foot pen, the smallest whale enclosure in North America. 

Daals, who has a permit to protest outside the park’s private property, will also carry a poster with a picture of Lolita and the words: “Swims 100 miles per day; confined to equivalent of a bath tub.” She hopes that her campaign will be effective in freeing the 3.2-ton whale from captivity and reuniting her with her pod of extremely rare and endangered Southern Resident killer whales near Puget Sound, off the coast of Seattle.

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Japanese student Reikko Hori is in the news for choosing to be a real-life castaway on the uninhabited island of Amparo in Indonesia. After 19 days of complete isolation, during which her only companions were a spear and a magnifying glass, the 22-year-old claims to have returned to normal life with a newfound appreciation for civilization.

The paid experience was arranged by Docastaway, a tour company that specialises in holidays in remote islands across the world, with packages that include varying levels of comfort. Hori, a self-described loner, chose ‘adventure mode’, the most extreme category, therefore becoming the first female voluntary castaway in history.

But the company was worried about her choice because she had no survival training whatsoever and was completely unprepared to live all by herself in the wild. According to their official website, Hori wouldn’t answer any questions or respond to their emails during the preparation phase a few months before the actual experience. She apparently wanted to survive in the wild as naturally as possible, with very little interference from experts.

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Meet Bagel, a.k.a ‘Sunglass Cat’, who became a social media sensation because of an eye condition that requires her to wear sunglasses at all times. Her shades are decorated with stick-on jewels, giving her a cool vibe that has earned her a reputation as one of the internet’s coolest cats. 

The Los Angeles feline was born without eyelids and her eyes are unable to produce tears. She was rescued from a shelter by Karen McGill when she was a two-month-old underweight kitten. Karen had to nurse her back to health, feeding her by hand every thirty minutes. Later, Bagel got three surgeries for her eye condition, and Karen still needs to apply drops to her eyes several times a day.

To protect Bagel’s sensitive eyes from harsh sunlight and dust, Karen came up with the idea of putting shades on her all the time. Over time, Bagel has come to associate her glasses as a means of comfort and protection. Without shades, her eyes are at a constant risk of being damaged due to cornea damage. Karen removes the jewel-lined glasses from time to time so Bagel can wash her eyes, but the keeps them on at all times in public. The cat also has allergies and cannot regulate her body temperature, which is why she is seen wearing clothes in a few photographs.

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Thanks to these new sneakers, you don’t need to wait for space tourism to take off to experience walking on the moon. Aptly named ‘MoonWalker’, these shoes rely on magnets to allegedly simulate walking in a low-gravity environment. 

On their Indiegogo campaign page, startup Moonshine Crea reveals that the ingenious shoes are made from an “incredibly durable yet soft and breathable” synthetic fabric on the outside, while the inside is made of a DuPont Tyvek synthetic polyethylene used by NASA in space station modules. The sole, made of memory foam, is designed to perfectly fit the unique shape of each wearer’s foot.

So far the shoes seem like regular sneakers, but what sets the 20:16 MoonWalkers apart are the two special layers hidden beneath the memory foam, which are embedded with the world’s most powerful magnets . According to the company, “each layer is made up of powerful N45 magnets that are strategically placed so the north poles face each other. This creates a repellant force, which leaves you light on your feet and happy as an astronaut.”

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While some of us find it difficult to host guests for a few weeks, this Chinese couple have generously shared their home with a mentally ill homeless person for the past 35 years.

When Xue Shunlu and his wife Li Huannv first found Xue Zhen on the streets of Fenglingdu, in China’s Shanxi Province, the poor man was in a terrible state – he was unable to talk or defend himself from bullies on the street. So the couple rescued him and took him to their house in a neighbouring village in Yuncheng city.

Although they lived in a small house and barely earned enough to support themselves, the kind couple didn’t hesitate to share everything they had with a total stranger. They told him to treat the house as his own and spent their free time teaching him to cook, clean, and take care of himself. They even allowed him to share Xue Shunlu’s family name.

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An Argentinian woman found it so hard to part with her recently deceased pet cat that she had its body stuffed by a taxidermist just so she could keep carrying it with her everywhere she goes.

Daniela Cardone and her stuffed cat Matute shot to fame a few days ago, when she posted some pictures of their trip to Lujan city, in the Buenos Aires province, on Instagram. Speaking to reporters, the former model said she simply couldn’t bear to part with Matute after he died around a month ago, so she sought out someone to help her preserve his body. She strongly believed that his soul was still around her, and it didn’t make sense for her to dispose of his body.

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At first glance, this rock, placed strategically in a small clearing in the woods part of an outdoor museum in Germany, seems like an ordinary boulder. But a closer look will reveal that the inconspicuous 1.5-ton boulder is far from ordinary. It’s actually an art installation with a fire-powered WiFi router and USB drive hidden inside!

Created by Berlin artist Aram Bartholl, the rock, named ‘Keepalive’, tries to highlight the contrast between ancient and modern survival techniques. Bartholl revealed that his inspiration to merge the concepts of primitive and modern survival came from the sight of people selling BioLite stoves during Hurricane Sandy. In the absence of electricity, people were actually using the flame-powered stoves to power their devices and stay connected. “It was funny – the power goes out, and people would buy these little stoves and make a fire to charge their phone,” he said.

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