Meet Katelyn Thornley, a seventh grade student who spends most of her day sneezing. The 12-year-old from Angleton, Texas, suffers from an unknown condition that causes her to sneeze over 12,000 times a day, preventing her from enjoying a normal childhood.

The mysterious ailment started about three weeks ago, just after she left a clarinet lesson. “I just started in little spurts, sneezing,” Katelyn explained. “I thought it was like, I’m allergic to something or didn’t wash out my mouthpiece the right way.” But it soon snowballed into something a lot worse – about 20 sneezes a minute all day long, making it difficult for her to do anything at all. “I’m constantly in pain with my abdomen, my legs are weak, I can barely eat,” she said.

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Luxury car giant Lexus is making headlines for creating a fully functional, drivable cardboard replica of its IS sedan. The ‘Origami Car’ was made by gluing slices of cardboard together on a steel and aluminum frame, with an electric motor powering it. The one-of-a-kind vehicle comes with fully fitted interiors, functioning doors, headlights, and wheels.

The striking cardboard car is meant to be a tribute to the thousands of skilled men and women – called takumi – who work on the Lexus production lines. These people apparently sharpen their craftsmanship and dexterity by practicing making an origami cat using only their non-dominant hand.

“The Origami Car takes the spirit of this talent to a far higher level, while also embracing the spirit of Lexus’s Creating Amazing global brand campaign,” the firm said in a statement.

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Move over extreme sports, ‘extreme phone pinching’ is guaranteed to deliver an adrenaline rush like never before. Warning: It’s not for the faint-hearted.

The nerve-wracking new challenge has people dangling their expensive smartphones over all sorts of dangerous places like toilets, drains, balconies and even high cliffs. There’s only one rule – they’ve got to ‘pinch’ their gadgets using only their thumb and forefinger!

The bizarre, rather pointless trend was apparently started by Twenty One Pilots, an American indie pop band. They posted a YouTube video of them performing the phone pinch stunt and it spread like wildfire across various social networks, garnering over 300,000 views. Before long, the hashtag #extremephonepinching became a thing and people began tweeting videos and pictures of their own attempts.

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Meet Natasha Wagner, who according to America’s denim industry, has a perfect sized butt. With a height of five feet eight inches and a 28-inch waist, her size 6 figure makes her the most coveted ‘live mannequin’ to create what popular denim brands believe to be the perfect pair of jeans.

So for the past 14 years, the 34-year-old fit model has been making a living trying on jeans for big brands like Gap, Lucky Brand, Old Navy, Levi’s, Paige, Vince, and more. Believe it or not, these brands have been making jeans to fit just one person – Natasha!

According to Jennifer De Clark, senior director of women’s design and merchandising at 7 For All Mankind, Natasha’s bottom is the perfect average of thin and curvy women. “Natasha’s curves are in all the right places,” she said. “And having perfect proportions is the key to a great jean that will fit many different body types. She is the perfect size 28!”

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A group of Russians are trying to construct the world’s first underwater church at Cape Fiolent, about 200 meters off the Crimean coast. Divers recently planted a large cross styled like a ship’s anchor at a depth of about 20 meters below sea level, marking the beginning of the ambitious project.

The church is partly sponsored by a Russian motorcycle club called Night Wolves, believed to have close ties with President Putin. Co-funding the project is the Russian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate. Both groups hope that the church will attract more tourists to the newly annexed Crimean peninsula.

“The underwater church will look like a church,” said Archimandrite Tikhon, who is also a diving enthusiast. “There will be icons inside – just like in a real church. Most probably they will be bas-reliefs of icons in stainless steel or stone.” He added that architects are working on the design and details of the structure.

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Kitten Von Mew, a burlesque dancer from Warwickshire, England, is so in love with the 1940’s era that she has modeled her entire life around it. Along with her husband Richard, she’s spent thousands of pounds redecorating their home with authentic furniture and decor from the ’30s and ’40s. Her wardrobe is filled with hundreds of vintage outfits, retro shoes, vintage gloves, hats, and other accessories.

Born Michelle, Kitten legally changed her name and dedicated her life to the ’40s about 15 years ago. Since then, she’s spent several hours each morning doing her hair in perfect victory rolls and carefully dressing herself in retro outfits. She inherited authentic furniture from her grandparents and combed through many flea markets to find even more 1940’s style decorations. “I love everything about the 1940s – the fashion, the music, the décor – I find it totally captivating,” she said.

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Despite its tropical climate, parts of Bangalore city in southern India have been experiencing what looks like snow. Except, it’s not actually snow, but a toxic foam from a severely polluted lake!

The 9,000-acre Bellandur lake is the largest one in the city, and also the most polluted. Decades’ worth of untreated chemical waste and sewage in the lake get churned into a white froth that’s as thick as shaving foam, every time it rains. This froth contains effluents like grease, oil, and detergents that sometimes catch fire, leading to one of the rarest sights in the world – a flaming lake.  

Many local residents are unnerved by the unnatural phenomenon. “Every time it rains and the water flows, the froth raises and navigating this stretch becomes risky,” said Visruth, who lives 30 meters away from the lake. “Due to the froth, visibility is reduced and the area also smells bad. Cars and bikes that pass this area get covered with froth.”

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A company in Zhengzhou, China’s Henan Province, has caused outrage online after some of its employees were spotted crawling on their hand and knees around a local lake because they couldn’t meet their sales targets!

The shocking corporal punishment was publicised by various local media outlets. According to the reports, at least a dozen people were seen dragging themselves on all fours on a wooden path along the lake. Their clothes were worn out and some of them were bleeding with bruises and scrapes.

When questioned about their unusual behavior, one of them told the reporter that they were being punished by their employer for their poor performance at work. One member of staff was stationed at the lake to make sure everyone finished their prescribed number of laps.

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Robot Taxi Inc., a Tokyo-based company, is gearing up to bring self-driving robot taxis to Japan’s roads early next year. They’ve invited residents to try out the taxi service in Fujisawa, in Kanagawa Prefecture. 50 people are all set to take part in the experiment.

According to Robot Taxi, the new cabs will take residents to pre-decided supermarkets about three kilometers from their homes. A company attendant will be present in the driver’s seat for safety reasons. The self-driving cars will be equipped with GPS, millimeter-wave radar, stereo vision cameras, and image analysis technologies.

The local government is fully supportive of the firm’s initiative, given that they’ve already tested automated cars on expressways before. But this will be the first time on local roads with residents. “This time, the robot taxi experiment will be conducted on actual city streets,” said government official Yuji Kuroiwa.

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Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID) is a serious psychological condition that gives able-bodied people a strong desire to be disabled. It’s what made this woman from North Carolina purposely blind herself by dropping drain cleaner into her eyes!

Jewel Shuping, 30, revealed that she’s been obsessed with blindness since childhood. “My mother would find me walking in the halls at night, when I was three or four years old,” she said. “By the time I was six, I remember that thinking about being blind made me feel comfortable.” So she would spend hours staring at the sun, hoping that it would damage her eyes.

The obsession increased as she aged, and by the time she was a teenager, Jewel had taught herself to move around in thick black sunglasses. She got her first cane at age 18 and became fully fluent in braille by age 20. “I was blind-swimming, which is pretending to be blind, but the idea kept coming up in my head and by the time I was 21 it was a non-stop alarm that was going off,” she said. Read More »

Desperate to raise funds for her ailing father’s treatment, a teenager in China’s Anhui province has taken to wearing a cow mask and charging people 5 yuan to ride her. She’s been at it for the past three months, but Hefei locals have branded her a fraud.

Now, news reports are featuring photographs of 15-year-old Hao Dongdong with her paralysed father, proving that she’s been telling the truth all along. “My dad needs 5,000 Yuan each month for medical treatments,” she told reporters. “My brother and sister need to go to school. I have no identity card [for work] so I have to beg.”

Dongdong’s father Hao Xinli used to be a farmer, but a back injury forced him to move to the city in 2000 to set up a small shop. Last year, when he and his wife were shopping in Hefei, they saw a mobile store giving away freebies as a promotional offer. They ran to the shop and tried taking what they could, but soon got into an altercation with the sales staff. Xinli was beaten badly, and his back pain became excruciating.

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Shridhar Chillal, from Pune, India, hasn’t cut his fingernails in over six decades. He began growing them when he was still in school, and now holds the Guinness World Record for the ‘Longest Fingernails on a Single Hand Ever’. The super-long talons on his left hand now have a cumulative length of 909.6 cm!

Chillal’s thumb nail is the longest at two meters and curls into a tight coil at the end. The middle finger nail comes a close second at 186.6 cm. The ring finger nail measures 181.6 cm, the little finger nail is 179.1 cm, and the index nail stands at 164.5 cm. As you can imagine, his nails have sabotaged every aspect of his life, including work and love.

“I can’t move much, so every half an hour or so I wake up and move my hand to the other side of the bed,” he admitted.

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A group of Russian scientists believe that the secret to eternal youth might actually lies in the permafrost of Siberia. They’re experimenting with a strain of bacteria that has managed to survive for millions of years in the permafrost. One enterprising scientist has even injected himself with the ancient bacteria discovered in 2009, in Sakha Republic, Siberia.

Anatoli Brouchkov, head of the Geocryology Department at Moscow State University, is the man behind the remarkable discovery. Two years ago, he volunteered to become a guinea pig for the 3.5 million year old bacteria after several successful trials on mice and human blood cells. And he claims to have become healthier and more energetic ever since.

“I started to work longer, I’ve never had a flu for the last two years,” he told The Siberian Times.

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Thanks to a couple of Swedish entrepreneurs, it might soon be possible to get a clean shave without the little nicks and cuts. They’ve done away with blades in their new invention ‘Skarp’, a futuristic razor that magically makes hair fall away when waved over skin!

Well, it’s not exactly magic. Skarp uses laser beams to assist in hair removal. The concept isn’t new, lasers have been used to eliminate body hair cosmetically and medically since 1989, when Morgan Gustavsson invented the IPL (Intense Pulse Light). He also wanted to bring lasers into everyday hair removal, but he couldn’t really do it before because the wavelengths could only cut through dark hair, not light or grey hair.

But now, Morgan and his partner Paul Binun claim to have discovered a part of hair molecules called chromophore shared by all humans irrespective of hair color. Chromophores can be cut easily with a particular wavelength of light. So they used the discovery to develop a commercial laser razor that can be used on any part of the body, by men and women.

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If you ever happen to visit Taiwan, you might be greeted to the sight of scantily-clad women in neon-lit glass kiosks by roadsides, waiting for men to pull over. Well, they’re not what you think!

These women are ‘Betel nut girls’ who peddle small snacks of tasty, stimulative betel nuts wrapped in betel leaves. They dress provocatively to attract potential buyers, but nuts is pretty much the only thing they sell.

The main roads are filled with around 60,000 such phone booth-style kiosks; they’re so much a part of the nation’s identity that they’re actually featured on old tourist guides. The women who operate the stalls are usually from poorer families, but according to news reports, the job pays more than housekeeping, waiting tables and other conventional jobs.

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