One of the most exclusive colleges in the world is located bang in the middle of the remote high California desert. The institution accepts only 12 male students a year, and believe it or not, it consistently tops Harvard’s yield rate!

Deep Springs College, founded in 1917, is unusual in every imaginable way. It has a miniscule student body, an alfalfa-farm-and-cattle-ranch campus, and a mandatory 20 hours of manual labor per week. In fact, the college was built on the concepts of self-governance, manual labor, and rigorous academics. So the 24-odd guys up there spend their college years studying hard and, farming even harder.

Located in the Inyo-White Mountains, just east of the Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada range, the campus spans 50 square miles in Deep Springs Valley. It offers a two-year liberal arts course, technically making it a junior college. But according to Vanity Fair, “Roughly 80 percent go on as juniors to colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia and Oxford, while the remainder typically embark on a year of service first.” This places Deep Springs college in a category of its own.

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Twitter, along with countless other social media websites, is often viewed as a productivity killer. But a small town in Spain has actually been using the platform to improve communication between authorities and the people. In fact, Twitter is so important to the people of Jun that they actually built a monument of the iconic ‘blue bird’ in the town’s square.

Since September 2011, the 3,500-strong community has used Twitter to spread local news, developments, job opportunities, orbituaries, and even school dinner menus! Residents book doctor’s appointments, register consumer complaints, and report crimes through their tweets. Jun’s Mayor, José Antonio Rodriguez Salas, has his own account, with a massive following of over 340,000. Locals can contact the Mayor by tweeting him directly.

All the town’s public services, including the police force, have their own Twitter accounts. The force, consisting of only one officer, drives a squad car with ‘@PoliciaJun’ painted on the bonnet. In fact, the bird logo can be seen everywhere, including the Mayor’s office. Even the guy who sweeps the streets tweets amusing messages, with before and after shots of his handiwork.  The town’s elderly aren’t ignored either – there’s a special program in place to teach them how to use the internet and social media.

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Sick of listening to women constantly complain about having to wear high heels, one man challenged himself to wear high heels for a whole day to prove “that girls are huge complainers.” It didn’t go exactly as he planned…

As any woman will tell you, high heels can make your legs look sexy, but wearing them for long periods of time is no picnic on your feet. Even single-sole pumps and platforms will prove painful if you stand or walk in them long enough, but Brandon Cohen, a video correspondent with BroBible.com, actually went for the worst possible option – full-fledged stilettos. He meant to spend a whole day in them, doing all kinds of activities to prove his point, but only managed to keep them on from 8:30 a.m. to 7:15 p.m, most of which he spent sitting, because he couldn’t stand anymore.

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The otherwise quiet town of Westfield, New Jersey, has become the focus of international media attention, after a family was reportedly forced out of their home by a series of bone-chilling letters from a stalker who calls himself “The Watcher”.

Derek and Maria Broaddus bought the six-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot turn-of-the century home for $1.3 million, in June 2014. Three days after signing the papers, they started receiving creepy letters from someone who claimed to be watching the house. “My grandfather watched the house in the 1920s and my father watched in the 1960s. It is now my time,” the first one read. “I have been put in charge of watching and waiting for its second coming.”

The creepy letters also mentioned the Broaddus’ children: “Do you need to fill the house with the young blood I requested?” the mysterious stalker asked. “Once I know their names I will call to them and draw them out to me.”

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Wesseh Freeman, a.k.a Weesay, became an internet sensation last December for his badass strumming skills. His unique handmade guitar – cobbled together from an old stick, a paint can, and three used strings – caught the attention of brothers Nikhil and Sachin Ramchandani, the owners of O! Chips, a potato chips company in Liberia. So they asked him to write a jingle for their brand, and posted a video on the company’s YouTube channel. The two-and-a-half minute clip instantly went viral.

Weesay, 37, is blind and homeless. But that hasn’t affected his musical abilities in the least. The man is truly gifted, and that’s evident just from the guitar he managed to fashion for himself. According to Guitar World, “His frets are made from bike spokes or coat hangers and are apparently movable; yet he has a mastery of intonation. This instrument should be completely out of tune…but it’s not! Weesay plays it like a boss.”

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Calling Albert Podell ‘well traveled’ would be an understatement. 78-year-old Podell, a former Playboy editor, can truly say that he’s seen it all, after spending half a century visiting every country in the world. He’s encountered pretty much everything on his travels, right from guerillas in Yemen, to flying-crab attacks in Algeria, and police interrogations in Cuba. He has chased water buffaloes, broken his bones, and eaten all kinds of weird stuff. He’s been robbed, arrested, and almost lynched!

Podell was bitten by the travel bug at a very young age. “Aged six, I started to collect postage stamps, and where the other kids specialised in certain countries, I wanted a stamp from every country in the world,” he told Daily Mail. “Getting a passport stamp from every one may have been inspired by that.”

“Those little coloured bits of perforated paper also instilled in me a fascination with travel because I wanted to see the lands where all the objects, people, and places depicted on those stamps came from.” So he resolved early on that “there was more to life than hanging around in one city forever.”

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Communications specialist Clay Hielscher seems like an average guy, but pay his home a visit and you’ll realise why he’s called the real-life Tony Stark. The Kansas man not only resembles the popular comic book character, but he is also passionate about building superhero suits from scratch – his house is like a costume prop shop for a motion picture studio.

Hielscher is a former law enforcement officer, which sort of explains his obsession with superhero battlesuits. It all started a few years ago, when he was building a 17-foot kayak, just to let off some steam. One of his friends took a look at his work and suggested that he try to construct an Iron Man battlesuit.

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Every year, in the month of May, women from the Nahua villages of Guerrero, Mexico, get together to beat the living daylights out of each other. All the blood they spill during the fight is collected in buckets, and later used to plough and water their lands. The villagers believe that this bizarre ritual will bring the rain and provide bountiful harvests!

The festival, like many others in Mexico, combines catholic and prehispanic traditions. On the first day, women wake up early to make large quantities of food. They prepare turkey, chicken, rice, boiled eggs, pozole, mole, and tortillas, which they take along with them to the fighting grounds. At the official site, they lay out the food and decorate the area with flowers and inflated turkey bellies. They recite prayers for the virgin Mary and for the local rain god Tlaloc, after which it is time for the fighting to begin.

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Rats are normally classified as vermin, but they can be heroes too. Proving the fact is APOPO, a Belgian NGO that trains African giant pouched rats to sniff out landmines and tuberculosis infections. Since 2006, these ‘hero rats’ have been working on minefields in Mozambique, clearing the country of over 13,000 landmines, thus reclaiming over 11 million square meters of land. They’ve also accurately analyzed over a quarter of a million blood samples for TB infections.

Bart Weetjens, founder of APOPO, first came up with the idea of training sniffer rats a couple of decades ago, when he was a student at the University of Antwerp. He used to keep pet rodents as a boy, so he knew that they were “very trainable, sociable, and intelligent creatures.” So when he read an article about gerbils being taught to recognise the scent of explosives, it got him thinking.

Weetjens wanted to use his experience of dealing with rodents to find a locally-sourced resolution to the problem of landmines. “I was looking for an appropriate solution that communities at the bottom of the pyramid could use, independent from expensive foreign know-how and technology,” he said. So he placed himself in the situation of the people affected by the problem, and looked at the resources they had at hand.

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‘The Land’ is a different kind of adventure playground in Wrexham, Wales, which doesn’t follow the traditional format of swings and slides. Instead, it allows kids to explore independence and take risks. The Land resembles a junk yard, where kids get to jump over barrels and into mud puddles, poke sticks into open fires, and hammer sharp nails into wooden planks.

“It’s shaped by children who attend,” said Claire Griffiths, play department manager at the Association of Voluntary Organisations, which manages The Land. “It’s open access provision so children come and go as they please. They build dens, saw, hammer; they create and they destroy.”

That pretty much sounds like a parent’s worst nightmare, but the concept is surprisingly popular. Most parents seem to agree that The Land offers a valuable childhood experience that has been missing for decades. It is the complete opposite of over-protective parenting that encourages children to stay indoors.

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Every year, between March and June, the 14-km shoreline of Japan’s Toyama Bay is lit up in blue. The electrifying light show isn’t man-made; it’s a natural phenomenon, caused by thousands of bioluminescent cephalopods known as ‘Glowing Firefly Squids’. These fascinating creatures normally live 1,200 ft underwater, but are pushed to the surface by waves during the Hotaru Ika (firefly squid) season.

Firefly Squid, or Watasenia Scintillans, are normally about three inches long and covered with photophores. Large photophores are present around their eyes and on the tips of their tentacles, while tiny photophores cover the entire body. These photophores contain light-producing chemicals that are responsible for the squid’s bioluminescence. Fireflies have similar photophores, so the squid are named after them.

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Award winning ornithologist George Archibald is a living legend among his peers. This man actually courted a female whooping crane for three years, until she laid eggs. He managed to form an unlikely bond with the bird, and is believed to have played a big role in saving the entire species from extinction.

The story goes back to the spring of 1976, when Tex the crane was the only female of her species at the San Antonio Zoo. She was also one of about 100 surviving whooping cranes in the world. Researchers at the International Crane Foundation – co-founded by George in 1973 – had realised that Tex’s genes could contribute to increasing the population of cranes, if she would breed in captivity. There was only one problem: Tex thought she was human!

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A major food safety scandal involving fake rice recently rocked China; news reports suggested that the grains were made by mixing potatoes with industrial synthetic resin. There were also rumors of the “cheap but profitable” rice being exported to other Asian countries, including Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and India.

The fake grains supposedly cannot be distinguished from natural rice when raw. The only way to identify plastic rice is by cooking it – it remains hard and is difficult to digest. One publication explained that soup cooked with plastic rice will form a plastic film over the top, which burns when heated.

Health experts are warning people that these grains, if consumed, could wreak havoc on the digestive system. According to an official from the Chinese Restaurant Association, eating three bowls of plastic rice would equal consuming one plastic bag!

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Hailey Ford may look like an ordinary nine-year-old girl, but her magnanimity is rather uncommon and awe-inspiring. The little saint has made it her mission to help the homeless in her community by giving them a place to sleep.

While most other kids her age are content playing with toys, Hailey picks up power tools to build tiny shelters for people living on the streets. “It just doesn’t seem right that there are homeless people,” she told KING 5 News. “I think everyone should have a place to live.”

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Meet Somchai Nitimongkolchai, Bangkok’s biggest Batman fan. The 43-year-old has been investing in Batman memorabilia for the past decade – his vast collection now consists of a whopping 50,000 pieces, including a LEGO Gotham City. And it’s all on display at his very own ‘Batcat Museum & Toys Thailand’.

Somchai, a self-confessed superhero geek, became obsessed with the Dark Knight ever since the 2005 film Batman Begins. He was blown away by Christian Bale’s performance as Batman. “I saw Batman Begins and was really impressed by how smart and brave Bruce Wayne was,” he said. He felt like Batman was an ‘approachable hero’ for the real world. “Anyone could just put on a mask and be Batman.”

Somchai, who ran an event-organising company at the time, had never collected anything until then. But the film inspired him to purchase his first collectible – a ceramic Batman piggy bank – for his office desk. Since then, he has combed every flea market and garage sale in Bangkok, looking for stuff related to his favorite superhero. “I started shopping on eBay and then learned more about how collectibles are marketed,” he said.

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