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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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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A 70-year old man from Bursa, Turkey died last week, after spending the last 47 years in the city hospital, not because he was seriously ill, but because he didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Abdullah Kozan walked through the doors of Bursa State Hospital in 1968, just after completing his mandatory military service. He was admitted with a severe headache, but soon asked the doctors if he could stay there a while longer, because he really didn’t have anywhere else to go. He got along with the staff from the beginning and claimed that he actually enjoyed living in the hospital, so the administration kept registering him as a new patient every time he got discharged at the end of his treatment.

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When Abigail Kingston got engaged, she almost immediately decided on her wedding attire – a 120-year-old dress that’s been worn by 10 other brides from her mother’s side of the family since the late 1800s.

The ancient two-piece dress is a family heirloom, first worn by Kingston’s great-great-grandmother Mary Lowry Warren in 1895. None of Lowry’s daughters were interested in the large gown, so it was first re-worn by her granddaughter in the ’40s. Later, Kingston’s mother and aunts continued the tradition of getting married in the same dress.

Abigail herself has known about the dress since she was a little girl. “When I was younger, while I was playing piano at my parents’ house, there was a framed picture of the first six brides wearing the dress, so I would think, ‘Someday,’” she said. But when the day finally arrived, she and her mother Leslie had to track the dress down.

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Desperate for revenge, a spurned Chinese man wrote his girlfriend the most expensive hate mail ever. He claims to have scratched his message on to the screens of nine brand new iPhone 6s smartphones, just to show her how wealthy he’s become since she dumped him for an iPhone 6.

The messages, when put together, read: “Last September, you dumped me for my friend because of an iPhone 6. Thanks to you looking down on me, I could work harder (and become successful). On the first anniversary after we broke up, I present to you nine iPhone 6s to mourn our doomed relationship.”

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A Chinese kid was in the news recently for flaunting his wealth in one of the most extravagant marriage proposals in recent times. He arranged a fleet of luxury cars in the shape of a heart before asking his high school sweetheart to marry him. The stunt worked its magic and he got a the answer he desired.

According to news reports, the Guangzhou-based entrepreneur who had dropped out of college to found his own company, decided on the bombastic proposal to make sure no one steals his girl away. They have been dating since junior high, but she has just started attending college, so to make sure no one even attempts any moves on her, he proposed preemptively. He rented a fleet of expensive cars and drove them to his girlfriend’s college dorm.

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In a bid to explore alternative methods of growing produce, an Italian company has created the world’s first underwater farm. The futuristic station – aptly named Nemo’s Garden – consists of five transparent biospheres anchored to the bottom of the sea off the coast of Savona, Italy. They’re being used to grow strawberries, basil, beans, garlic, and lettuce.

“The main target of this project is to create alternative sources of plant production in areas where environmental conditions make it difficult to grow crops through conventional farming, including lack of fresh water, fertile soils, and extreme temperature changes,” said project spokesperson Luca Gamberini. “We are trying to find an alternative and economically viable technology enabling efficient production.”

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Believe it or not, the day has finally come when people can have their iPads wait in line every time a new iPhone is released! A woman named Lucy Kelly was the first to try it out – she sent an iPad robot to stand proxy for her at an Apple store in Sydney, just before the launch of the new iPhone 6s.

The robot, also named Lucy, consists of an iPad attached to a Segway-type device. Created by Californian company Double Robotics, it allows a person to be virtually present anywhere without actually having to be there. And the company that Kelly works for – Atomic 212 – happened to order six of these robots to play with at their office.

“We use them for everything, just to show new technology,” Kelly said. “It is a cool demonstration of what the future of technology will be. We are obsessed with them.” So on the eve of the iPhone 6s release in Sydney last Thursday, Lucy the robot arrived to take the fourth place in the long line of Apple fans.

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