55-year-old Slavik, a homeless man from the Ukrainian city of Lviv, is making waves online with his outrageous fashion choices. Although he appears disheveled, he puts together stylish outfits using the various articles of clothing that he picks up from the city’s trash bins and homeless aid centers. He changes clothes at least twice a day and never wears the same outfits. He also styles his hair and beard to match each ensemble, and even shaves his armpits!

Slavik’s unique grooming routine was introduced to the world by Ukrainian photographer Yurko Dyachyshyn. Yurko was drawn to Slavik while working on a project in the city center; he noticed Slavik approaching strangers asking for spare change. Soon, he began photographing the homeless man’s sartorial choices, paying him roughly $1 per meeting.

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A weight loss contest held in Dubai this summer promised to pay all its participants two grams of gold for every kilogram of body weight lost. The initiative was dubbed ‘Your Child in Gold’ and followed last year’s ‘Your Weight in Gold’ contest organized by the Dubai Municipality. Over 7,500 winners were declared this year, which will collectively be awarded 40kg of gold worth Dh6 million (over $1.6 million).

“This year the priority was given for families as they will get double rewards than individual participants when they participate with their family members,” the official Dubai Municipality website declared. “Each family is allowed to participate with two of their children below 14 years old.”

Families that enrolled with their children were given the chance to win double the reward – two grams of gold per kilo of body weight lost. Over 28,000 Dubai residents enrolled in the month of July. Funnily, a lot of them had to be turned down because their kids weren’t actually overweight.

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Meet Oscar, a cat with a supernatural ability to feel when people are about to die. In over 50 documented cases, Oscar, who lives in a nursing home , has curled up beside patients in their final hours, seeing them through to the ‘other side’.

His unique story was revealed by Dr. David Dosa, a geriatrician and assistant professor at Brown University, who claims Oscar’s predictions have rarely been wrong in the past six years. In fact, he has even proved medical staff wrong at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Rhode Island, where he was adopted seven years ago as a kitten.

Dr. Dosa first told the world about Oscar’s rare gift in an article in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2007. Since then, the cat has accurately sensed even more deaths, convincing the geriatrician that it wasn’t just a series of coincidences. Dr. Dosa eventually wrote a book about his experiences with Oscar at the nursing home. It’s called ‘Making rounds with Oscar: The extraordinary gift of an ordinary cat’.

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Thomas Yang’s art is simple, minimal, and brilliant. The Singapore-based designer/illustrator couples his artistic talent with his passion for cycling to produce ‘bike print illustrations’ of world famous landmarks with bicycle tire tracks.

Thomas calls the series ‘100 copies’, because it is limited to, well, 100 prints per piece. The series consists of illustrations of some of the world’s most notable architectural landmarks, made using only the bike tires coated with black pigment.

Some of the most popular works in the series include illustrations of the London Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, and the Empire State Building. Each piece comes stamped with a quirky name and edition number, along with its own special bike-themed description.

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Many would call former NFL Star Jason Brown crazy for giving up his career for a dream, but he is convinced it was the right thing to do. The 31-year-old, who was once ranked one of the best players in the league and was offered a $35 million contract to play for the St. Louis Rams, gave it all up to start a farm near his home in North Carolina. He now spends his time growing sweet potatoes and distributing the crop among the poor.

When Brown first decided to make the move back to his home county of Louisburg, his agent told him that he was making the biggest mistake of his life. But he was convinced that this was the right thing to do. “I looked right back at him and I said, ‘No, I’m not. No, I’m not,’” Brown said.

“God revealed to me that he had something greater in store for me and that my family should move back to my home state of North Carolina and start a farm,” Brown wrote on his website. “This really caught us by surprise because we knew nothing about farming. Yet, out of obedience, we started looking for available farmland.”

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Chinese businessman He Liesheng is putting Tiger Moms to shame by taking ‘pushy parenting’ to whole new levels. ‘Eagle Dad’, as he calls himself, has only one philosophy when it comes to raising his son: “We think that not having adventures in life is the most dangerous thing.”

Well, adventures don’t sound all that bad, but wait till you hear what he’s put his son through so far. At age four, He Yide was made to jog in the snow, while wearing only underpants. It was supposed to be a character building exercise, and the video clip that Liesheng shared online showed the boy crying while running in New York’s subzero temperatures. It earned him the name ‘Running Naked Boy’ on Chinese social media.

A year later, Yide was taught to fly a plane and he made a 35-minute flight above Beijing Wildlife Park in an ultralight aircraft, breaking the Guinness Record for the world’s youngest pilot.

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In a bid to highlight the sexism faced by his female colleague, Australian TV presenter Karl Stefanovic conducted a year-long experiment during which he wore the exact same imitation Burberry suit every day for a year. As it turns out, no one noticed, while his co-host on Channel 9’s Today, Lisa Wilkinson, continued to receive snarky comments for her fashion choices.

According to Stefanovic, he was concerned by the level of scrutiny that women, especially his co-host, are subjected to for their style. He said that Wilkinson is a victim of regular unsolicited fashion advice from viewers and other mediapersons.

Some of the emails she has received are quite disturbing. “Who the heck is Lisa’s stylist?” an angry viewer demanded to know. “Today’s outfit is particularly jarring and awful. Get some style,” wrote another.

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For the past twelve years, this Dutch woman’s to-do list has consisted of only one item – to drive a tractor all the way to the South Pole. That is a rather unusual goal to have, but Manon Ossevoort has worked very hard to make it happen, and the 38-year-old is all set to scratch it off her list this month. When asked if people think she’s crazy, her response was simple: “Only if they haven’t met me.”

Manon’s story actually started in 2005, when she got in a tractor and left her home town in Holland on a 38,000 kilometer road trip through Europe, the Balkans and Africa, finally terminating at the Cape of Good Hope in Cape Town.

She intended for Cape Town to serve as a port to her final destination – Antarctica. Unfortunately, she missed the boat that was supposed to take her there due to various delays. So Manon spent the next few years back home, in Holland – she wrote a book, worked as a motivational speaker, gave birth to a baby girl, and teamed up with tractor makers Massey Ferguson for a ride that could bear the brunt in Antarctica.

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For over a year, 47-year-old Scott Loxley has been walking across Australia dressed as a Stormtrooper. He started the quest on Nov 2 last year, with a goal of covering 15,000 kilometers on foot, non-stop, with no support crew. His unique journey has taken him from Melbourne to Tasmania, through the debilitating Nullarbor Plain, and up the west coast to Bourne, leading up to Darwin. He’s walked a whopping 9,000 kilometers so far, and with 6,000 more to go, he has no intentions of stopping.

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Brazilian artist João Carvalho may be only 15 years old, but his incredible talent more than makes up for his lack of experience. The young artist can completely transform plain paper into ruled notebook sheets with 3D illusions popping out of them.

He starts by drawing blue lines on a blank sheet, but distorts them and adds intense shadows at just the right places, adding depth to his dessigns and creating the effect of three dimensional shapes that seem to jump off the page.

Some of these shapes include popular characters like Homer Simpson, Scooby Doo, and Jerry the mouse. He also creates effects like ripples of flowing water and wrinkled paper.

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Tilling a field is hard work, so it’s hard to believe that there are people who actually do it for sport. However, rototiller racing is actually a thing!  The world championship is held every year during the PurpleHull Pea festival in Emerson, Arkansas, where the world’s fastest garden tillers get together to compete for the highly coveted $500 prize.

“There is simply no other event like it,” the PurpleHull website declares. “Unique among motorsports, we like to say it is the highlight of the tiller racing season. ‘Course, to the best of our knowledge, our one-day event is the tiller racing season. Souped-up garden tillers from near and far come to compete in the world’s premier tiller racing event.”

The race begins with one competitor (a.k.a tiller pilot) per lane (200-feet-long), with the referees waiting at the finish line with their eyes on stopwatches. When the starter waves the flag, the racers are off, kicking up a huge cloud of dirt as they go. The fastest tiller is declared the winner.

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In an attempt to understand what women go through every day, a couple of German radio DJs recently had their chests injected with a saline solution to emulate female breasts. John and Rasheed, who are actually well-know in Berlin for their strange experiments, underwent a one-hour procedure with cosmetic surgeon Mark Wolter to get temporary boobs for 24 hours.

“Mom, I’m sorry,” said Rasheed, just before he and his colleague were strapped down for the procedure. John had brought along his wife and her bikini for support.

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While most women turn to ice cream and tissues for the much needed post-breakup comforting, this Chinese woman chose a different way to deal with heartbreak – she went and got herself a fake wedding with the man who dumped her!

The woman, who calls herself ‘Doudou’, is a student in Wenzhou city in eastern China’s Zhejiang Province. She told reporters that she’d been swept off her feet by a businessman, 11 years her senior, whom she’d met at a restaurant. “I found him charming and romantic and thought I had met my dream man, and that we would spend the rest of our lives together,” she said.

Unfortunately, Doudou’s dreams were shattered when she discovered that her knight-in-shining-armor was already married. This resulted in a furious row, but she had already fallen for him hard. “I was already in too deep, and didn’t know what to do,” she said.

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Princess, a four-year-old German Spitz, is supposedly the world’s only hypnodog – a dog that can hypnotize people. She has been showing off her unique skill on stage for the past two years, alongside her owner Krystyna Lennon, a qualified hypnotist.

According to Lennon, Princess is able to make people fall asleep by just staring into their eyes. This might be linked to the primal ability of dogs to hypnotize their prey, but no other dog has ever been able to do it to humans before. “As far as I am aware, she is definitely the only hypnodog in the UK – possibly even the world,” Lennon asserted.

The Leeds-based mother-of-three said that Princess can hypnotize anyone, but some people react more strongly than others. “It is definitely not something that just any dog can do, it is a very specific skill,” she added. “They either have it or they don’t. It’s about their natural ability, it’s all down to the dog. They need to be very well trained and well behaved.”

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Since 2009, 32-year-old Shanyna Isom has been suffering from a mysterious skin condition that causes fingernails to grow out of the hair follicles all over her body. The mystery illness is so inconceivably strange that even after five years, doctors have no idea what is wrong with her. According to physicians treating her at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center, in Baltimore, Shanyna is the only person in the world suffering from the bizarre disease.

It all started in 2009, when Shanyna – then a law student at the University of Memphis – suffered a massive asthma attack. She went into the emergency room where was given a large dose of steroids. Soon after, she developed an allergic reaction to the steroids, and her skin began to itch uncontrollably. Although she was prescribed Benadryl and other allergy drugs , her condition kept getting worse.

“It was uncontrollable and we didn’t know what it was. Black scabs were coming out of her skin,” Shanyna’s mother Kathy Gary explained. “The nails would grow so long and come out and regrow themselves. They are hard to touch and stick to you.” Soon, her legs started to turn black.

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