This is one of the grossest world records I have ever covered, but it’s just so unusual I couldn’t resist sharing it with you guys. A man has kept the around 95,200 pieces of nicotine gum he has chewed over the last six years and put them all together in what is considered the world’s largest gumball.

50-year-old Barry Chappell, from California’s Palos Verdes Estates, has been busy over the last few years, building a 175-pound chewy monstrosity with a diameter of 62 inches, out of the tens of thousands of nicotine gum pieces he’s chewed. Barry is completely aware of the fact that most people who hear about his hobby are more or less disgusted, but that doesn’t make him less proud of his achievement. After all he did stick to the task for six long years, using every one of the approximately 95,200 pieces of nicotine gum he has used to help him stay away from cigarettes. Now his efforts are about to be rewarded, as Ripley’s Believe It or Not decided to acquire his giant gumball and present it as the largest medicated gumball in the world.

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A video showing Chinese soldiers in a circle passing an explosive satchel from one man to another, until one of them decides to throw it in a hole just before it explodes, has been making the rounds online, leaving everyone flabbergasted.

Photos of South Korea’s special forces troops training in all kinds of extreme conditions have been showing up on the Internet for a few years now, but nothing those guys go through compares to the shocking drill the Chinese devised. During an exhibition drill in Hong Kong, last month, an elite garrison of 6,000 PLA troops staged a series of impressive exercises for the visit of the island’s chief executive, Sir Donald Tsang. Snipers shot tiny glasses, soldiers carried heavy logs and jumped through rings of fire, but nothing as incredible as a group of men playing a game of pass-the-bomb.

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New York-based artist, Judith Braun, creates giant symmetrical wall paintings, using only her fingertips as brushes. This would be difficult to do with one hand at a time, but Judith sometimes uses both hands at the same time.

As children, we all got our hands dirty then tried to use our fingers to draw, but I doubt any of our “masterpieces” looked anything like those of Judith Braun. By dipping her hands in charcoal, pastel and chalk, and using them as paintbrushes, Braun is able to create truly unique symmetrical works of art. Using her own special technique, she produces all kinds of abstract images, patterns and shapes.  “Abstraction keeps the images free to be anything, while the symmetry resolves that fluidity into something, like liquid energy crystallizing. This crystal metaphor is further reflected in the carbon medium that, under heat and pressure, becomes a diamond.  I like to think I’m drawing with diamond dust”, Judith Braun says about her art.

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If you’ve been wanting to get into shape but haven’t had the time to exercise, Aerobic House Cleaning might just be the thing for you. The fitness program was devised by Steve Markovich, who has been following it for the past 16 years.

The 57-year-old from Crescent Springs, Ky., has managed to make a heart-pumping workout out of ordinary chores such as vacuuming and washing windows. According to Markovich, the vacuum cleaner is the most versatile exercise machine ever. He’s found a way to combine squats, lunges and hip twists while he’s getting the floors clean. He says that he burns so many calories through house chores that he can afford to allow himself a few treats once in a while. A vanilla ice cream topped with peanut butter, for instance. He seems pretty fit for his age, although he does sport a tiny little paunch.

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Nature has always been about the ‘survival of the fittest’, but sometimes even the fittest cannot survive its harsh conditions. What happened with David Austin is a classic example of how merciless the outdoors can truly be. He had embarked upon a year-long survival challenge in the Scottish wilderness, but was found dead within a month.

The 29-year-old from Derby was on a mission inspired by English adventurer Bear Grylls. Sadly however, his body was discovered on December 31st by a track worker in a remote mountain hut located in Corrour, Highland Perthshire. The condition in which the body was found suggests that it had been lying there for several weeks, unnoticed. According to post mortem reports, the most plausible cause for death was hypothermia.

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Celebrity TV Gardner David Domoney has made a startling revelation. The drug that has helped so many men spruce up their love-life apparently works wonders for flowers as well. And only 1/50^th of a regular sized pill of Viagra is all that’s required.

Cut flowers that are placed in a vase end up wilting in no time at all. But now with Viagra, the life and freshness of flowers can actually be doubled. Although men might not find this piece of information very amusing, I’m sure there are plenty of women out there who would love to try out this simple, yet excellent tip. According to Domoney, “you only need a tiny amount of Viagra to stiffen things up nicely.” By ‘things’, I’m assuming he means the flowers.

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Artists from Chinese creative agency Senseteam cut apart banknotes from various country and recomposed them as detailed portraits, in a series called Big Business 3.

‘Currency symbolizes the value of a nation and its position in the world,’ the designers say, so their portraits ‘reflect the subtle relationships and influences across money, desire,
society, nations, and human beings.’ They also prove money can also be used for something much more meaningful than shopping and making bank deposits – in this case art and cultural statements. To create their colorful artworks, Senseteam members painstakingly cut banknotes into hundreds of strips and glued them together in the shape of intricate human portraits.

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If you can pay someone to help you get a date, then who says you can’t do the same when you want to dump them? Meet Jonathan Kiekbusch from Brighton, U.K., the 21-year-old who has managed to make a living out of breaking-up for others. Not surprisingly, he’s single himself.

Jonathan doesn’t charge the sun and moon for his services. You can avail them at a flat fee of £5 ($8) plus expenses. If he puts in more time, it’s at £20 an hour. Not so bad when you consider the prospect of facing your girlfriend/boyfriend, having to tell them you’re not so in to them anymore. Again, not surprisingly, most of Jonathan’s clients are male.

Of course, this isn’t his only job. Marketing executive by day, and relationship-breaker by night, Jonathan got into the profession when he realized his potential by helping a few friends. His first time was with a friend called Stuart, who was always fighting with his girlfriend. One night he spoke to the two of them during a fight, making them see that they weren’t really suited for each other. The couple parted ways on amiable terms. After a few more of such incidents, Jonathan had to break up with his own girlfriend, and it ended pretty badly. He wished he could have had someone else intervene and make things easier, and that’s when he realized the opportunity that lay before him. He instantly grabbed it.

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Here’s something I never thought I’d hear, let alone write an article about – faecal transplants. Yes, it’s exactly what you think  it is. Taking the poop out of one person and putting it into another. It’s a lot, more disgusting that it sounds, but this medical procedure actually has the potential to save lives. And would you believe, it’s been around since the late 1990s?

Dr. Alisdair MacConnachie is perhaps the only doctor in the UK to have ever performed the transplant. Calling it a proven treatment, this is how he says it’s done. A patient is put on antibiotics up until the night before, after which pills are given to control the stomach acids. The next morning a donor will come in and provide a stool sample. The donor is usually a close relative who tends to eat the same kind of food and lives in the same environment as the patient. Next, 1oz of the sample is taken and churned with salt water in a blender. Eww, right? No wait, it gets worse. The fluid is then poured through a coffee filter to produce a very watery liquid. And now, for the worst part – a tube is inserted up the patient’s nose that goes all the way down to the stomach. 1fl oz of the liquid is poured right in. I will now give you a moment to recover.

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This one is definitely going in the file as one of the most bizarre church stories ever. I mean, we’ve seen ministers rapping the nativity story and also starting tattoo parlors at church. But putting a bed on the roof of a church to encourage couples to have sex? That’s just taking it a bit too far.

Ed Young is a Baptist minister at the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas. He recently co-authored a book with his wife Lisa, called ‘Sexperiment – 7 days to lasting intimacy with your spouse’. Through the book, the minister and his wife encourage couples to go on a 7-day sex challenge. They say that this is what is needed to put the zing back into marriages. The Reverend even conducted the experiment among members of his congregation and says that the couples came back with some highly positive results.

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Chaiten – The Chilean Town Engulfed by Volcanic Mudflow (Environmental Graffiti)

World of Warcraft Addicts Pee in Bottles to Stay Glued to Computers (The Register)

1,000-Pound Butter Sculpture to Power Farm for Three Days (Huffington Post)

Impressive Boat Made from Thousands of Donated Items (Daily Mail)

Real-Life Milka Purple Calf Born in Croatia (You Kidding Me!?)

The World’s Most Expensive Quad Bike (BBC)

Man Lost in Blizzard Burns Money to Survive (The Star)

The Beautiful Geometry of Suburbia from Above (Environmental Graffiti)

16-Year-Old Sails Around the World (The Guardian)

Man Shoots Nail in Brain, Doesn’t Notice (Chicago Tribune)

Most people look at old newspapers as trash, but for artist Gugger Petter it’s a challenging medium for which she has the utmost respect. Using  a special weaving technique, she’s able to take fragile newspapers and turned them into beautiful portraits.

Although she considers the informative purpose of the newspaper important, Petter has been fascinated with this unusual art medium because it presents her with a black/white/and limited color palette, which she has always preferred. In 1986, when she first arrived in California, she laid eyes on a stack of discarded newspapers yellowed by the sun, and found it very intriguing. From that day forth she started thinking about ways she could use this material in her art. She started by rolling newspapers into tubes and creating wall and floor sculptures, but after a couple of years she developed her weaving technique.

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I’ve read a lot of reports stating that the electro-magnetic radiation from mobile phones and other Wi-Fi devices are harmful to humans. But I never really believed it until I actually heard the story of these two French women who are living in a cave to escape these evil rays.

Anne Cautain and Bernadette Touloumond suffer from hypersensitive reactions to electro-magnetic radiations. The symptoms include unbearable burning and terrible headaches, so bad that they couldn’t stand to live in the outside world anymore. After trying several other options, a cave has become their ultimate refuge. Anne and Bernadette’s cave is located outside the town of Beaumugne, on the edge of the Vercors plateau range, in France. To gain access to the area, a small ladder needs to be scaled while clinging to a rope. A sign reading “Mobile Phones Prohibited” is displayed on the hillside. 52-year-old Anne says, “I can’t take any sort of electro-magnetic waves, whatever they may be: Wi-Fi, mobile phones or high-tension wires.” She was the first to settle down in the cave, and is now spending her third winter there.

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Money is one of the best motivators for most people. And when money is tied to something like fitness? Well, you’re bound to get fit. Here’s a system that pays you when you workout and takes away your money when you don’t.

GymPact is an iPhone application started by a couple of young Harvard graduates – Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer. The entire concept is based on the idea that people do not like to lose money. Zhang, an economics major, says, “Behavioral economics show that if you tie cash incentives to things that are concrete and easy to achieve like getting to the gym, it’s very effective. People don’t like losing money and it’s one of the strongest motivators, much more than winning money.” The app is free to use and has a database that covers over 40,000 gyms. That’s more than 70% of the gyms in the U.S. If your gym isn’t listed, you can add it to the app. You pay money when you don’t work out and the amount that’s pooled up from the non-exercisers is divided up between those who do workout. A cut from that amount is taken by the company as profits. So let’s take a quick look at how the system works.

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This is the story of a man who has fathered 14 children without ever being intimate with a woman. How, you ask? Why sperm donation, of course.

“Donorsexual” is what 36-year-old Trent Arsenault from Freemont, California, calls himself. Since 2006, the computer security specialist has been giving away his sperm free of cost, through a one-man sperm bank he runs from home. His service is mainly for couples who are unable to conceive naturally, so they pick up sperm samples from him and use them for artificial insemination. This sure does sound weird not to mention, highly unhygienic. I doubted if this is even permitted legally. Turns out it isn’t. Sperm banks in the U.S. are regulated by the FDA, and they’ve issued Arsenault with a cease-and-desist order. The order is based on the fact that the he did not take the necessary legal precautions to prevent the spread of communicable diseases. He could face up to a year in prison and a $100,000 fine.

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