Care to stay in a Toilet-Home?

Care to stay in a Toilet-Home?

Notice any resemblance to any of your household item? No?

Now a better look from the top, manage to notice it by now? Yes, you're right! It's a toilet-shaped home, the world's one and only toilet house. The house design was brainchild by Sim Jae-duck, chairman of the organising committee of the Inaugural General Assembly of the World Toilet Association to mark the association's first general assembly in November.

Worth US$1.6 million, the 4,508-sq-foot two-storey concrete and glass structure features a couple of bedrooms, four deluxe toilets, and even a small garden in the front of the house. The toilets have features that range from elegant fittings to the latest in water conservation devices. The house located in Suweon, South Korea is named Haewoojae, which signifies in Korean "a place of sanctuary where one can solve one's worries". He hopes his toilet house will highlight the global need for better sanitation. Before he moves in, anyone who is flush with funds can rent it for US$50,000 a day, with proceeds going to his campaign to provide poor countries with proper sanitary facilities.

Served as a Mayor in Suweon from 1995-2002, His drive to transform toilets into "clean and beautiful resting places imbued with culture" earned him the nickname "Mayor Toilet". His achievements motivates him to launch the Korea Toilet Association in 1999. The proposed World Toilet Association might be seen to rival squeaky-clean Singapore, where the World Toilet Organisation is based, but Sim has said the work of the two bodies will not overlap. They are dedicated to provide and promote clean sanitation to the more than 2 billion people around the world who live without toilets.

Epidemics caused by poor sanitation worldwide cost two million lives a year. Worldwide, 2.6 billion people live without toilets. Elsewhere, poorly designed flush toilets waste vast amounts of potential drinking water. "Toilets were once regarded as stinking and dirty places. Not any more. They must be treated as the sanctuary that protects human health," Sim said. Ironically, Sim was born in a restroom which is intentional by her mother because traditional beliefs that people born in restrooms will enjoy longer life!

Source : koreatimes.co.kr

Riding a Horse in a Plastic Ball

Riding a Horse in a Plastic Ball

In 2006 at the Stockholm International Horseshow, Oliver Garcia rides a horse inside a huge plastic ball.

Good horsey, don't panic or else I have nowhere to run.

World Record nobody wishes to attempt

World Record nobody wishes to attempt

This is one world record that nobody wishes to neither attempt nor break. That's because this record is about "Greatest Distance Thrown in a Car Accident" and is currently held by Matthew McKnight. The 29-year-old record-holder lived to tell about being thrown 118 feet by a car that hit him while traveling about 70 mph. He was struck on Oct. 26, 2001, while trying to help accident victims along Interstate 376 in Monroeville, about 15 miles east of Pittsburgh.

He suffered two dislocated shoulders plus a broken shoulder, pelvis, leg and tailbone. He spent two weeks in the hospital and 80 days in rehab before returning to work in April 2002. McKnight is a volunteer firefighter and paramedic, though he was not on duty when he stopped to help the accident victims. He works full-time as a communications specialist at Mercy Hospital in Pittsburgh.

McKnight's emergency room physician, Dr. Eric Brader, submitted paperwork for the record, which Guinness recognized in 2003. It was not listed in the book until the 2008 edition, however. "I thought it was a big joke. Dr. Brader is known for joking around a lot," McKnight told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "But when he brought (the paperwork) to me, I saw how serious he was." Mcknight hopes that nobody will ever break his record for a good reason.

Source : MSNBC News

M. Schumacher the Fastest Taxi Driver

M. Shumacher the Fastest Taxi Driver

When one cabbie in southern Germany apparently was not driving fast enough, his customer, former Formula One champion Michael Schumacher, took the wheel himself. The seven-times world champion shocked a cab driver by taking over the wheel in order to be on time for a flight.

Schumacher, 38, flew into the aerodrome at the Bavarian town of Coburg on Saturday and took a taxi to the village of Gehuelz, 30 kilometres away, to pick up a new puppy - an Australian Shepherd dog called "Ed". But when the former Formula One ace, plus his wife and two children, caught a taxi back to the airport they were short on time and, afer a polite request, cab driver Tuncer Yilmaz watched in wonder as Schumacher took the wheel.

"I found myself in the passenger seat, which was strange enough, but to have "Schumi" behind the wheel of my cab was incredible, he drove at full throttle around the corners and over-took in some unbelievable places." Mr Yilmaz was well rewarded for the unusual journey - on top of the 60 euros (88 US dollars) fare, he was also given a 100 euros (146 US dollars) tip.

Schumacher’s spokeswoman, Sabine Kehm, confirmed the story. She said Schumacher had flown in from Switzerland on Saturday on his private jet to buy a puppy from a breeder in the town of Gesuelz. The German track ace, who now lives in Switzerland, retired from Formula One in 2006 after a glittering career and, despite test drives for his old team Ferarri, has insisted there is no chance of a return to racing.

Source : BBC News

Science changed Mice fear of Cat

Science changed Mice fear of Cat

In nature, rodents are afraid of cats when they smelled their presence. But this may be a thing in the past as scientist found how to genetically erase the mice's phobia! Scientist at the University of Tokyo used genetic engineering to successfully switch off a mice instinct to run at the presence of cats. This new method shattered common believes that fear is learned through experience.

Mice are naturally terrified of cats and usually panic or flee at the moment they smelt its presence. Humans will shy away at certain smell too, we are born with a dislike of curdled and moldy food and when we detect rotten food we will distance ourselves from the smell instinctively. The findings suggest that the human aversion to dangerous smells could also be genetically predetermined, according to research leader Ko Kobayakawa.

The genetic surgery had only affected the nerve cells in the nose (dorsal zone olfactory sensory neurons) that can trigger fear, but they did not lose the feeling of fear entirely. They found that the altered mice still froze if they heard a cat meow. "This observation may suggest that the mice only lacked the innate fear responses to cats' odors, but they did not lose the feeling of fear," said Dr Kobayakawa.

The technique has great potential in neuroscience, he said "We think it as the power to clarify many unrevealed principles of the brain, those which generate emotions and behaviors in mammals." There is increasing evidence that humans do respond to the smell of signaling chemicals - pheromones, - added Dr Denise Chen, of Rice University, Houston. "Only a few years ago, many in the scientific community would not even entertain the idea of a human pheromone.

"The past couple of years have witnessed a paradigm shift in this belief, as a result of an explosion of findings about the involvement of the main olfactory system in pheromone sensing." The idea of the presence of both learned and innate systems for processing smells within the main olfactory system may shed light on understanding and elucidating the differences in which humans process salient social chemo signals (for example, fearful sweat) and other types of smells (for example, non-emotional body odor or non-social smells)."

Source : news.nationalgeographic.com
Watch Video : www.guardian.co.uk

It's Dove at first sight

Its Dove at first sight.

It's like a tale straight out of Disney. An abandoned baby monkey, close to death, is revived by the love of a bird. The 12-week-old macaque was rescued on Neilingding Island, in Guangdong Province, China, after being abandoned by his mother.

Taken to an animal hospital, he was weaned back to physical health but still showed little appetite for life. It was not until a fellow patient, a white pigeon, took him under her wing and showed him love and affection that he perked up.

The blossoming relationship helped to revive the baby macaque who has developed a new lease of life, say staff at the sanctuary. Now the unlikely duo are never far from each other's side.

Source : dailymail.co.uk

Mr. Tall hangs with Mr. Short

Mr. Tall hangs with Mr. Short

They finally met, with disbelief in each other's uniqueness.

Bao Xishun, former world's tallest man, who stands at 7.9 feets tall shook hands with one of the shortest man, He Pingping at height of 2.4 feet (73cm). Amazingly, both of them actually lives in the same region of Inner Mongolia.

Bao Xishun was once registered in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's tallest man in 2006, but his record was beaten just earlier this month by a Ukrainian. He Pingping, however, is not the world's shortest man as the current record belongs to Lin Yih-Chih from Taiwan who measured at 67.5cm, 5.5cm shorter than Pingping.

Source : dailymail.co.uk

Giraffe-neck women

Although they are a small minority hill tribe in the Golden Triangle of Thailand, no description of Thai hill tribes would be complete without mentioning the Paduang or Paduang hill tribe, better known to the world as the tribe of the long neck women.

The women of the Padaung hill tribe wear heavy brass ornaments around their neck and limbs. These ornaments look like separate rings but are really a continuous coil of brass that can weigh anywhere from five to twenty-two kilograms and measure up to 30 meter in length. The quantity of visual rings (in reality, the length of the brass coil) is increased every year, according to the age of the woman.

Young Paduang girls start wearing rings from the age of six, adding one or two more coil-turns (or visual rings) yearly, until the age of about 16. Once fastened, the rings are for life, to remove the full coil of brass would cause the collapse or even fracture of the woman's neck. In the past, removal of the brass rings was a punishment for adultery. The punishment was, that since the neck muscles had severely weakened, by years of not supporting the neck, the woman must spend the rest of her life, holding her head with both hands or lying down.

It is a myth, that the brass rings have elongate the neck of the wearer. Any orthopedic surgeon will tell you that lengthening the neck would lead to paralysis or even death. The reality is, that the appearance of a longer neck is a visual illusion. The weight of the brass rings has over the years pushed down and deformed the collar bone plus the upper ribs, to such an effect that the collar bone appears to be part of the neck.

Despite the obvious discomfort and the daily task of cleaning the brass ring coil, plus other handicaps, like having to use a straw to drink, the Paduang hill tribes women say that they are used to their custom and are happy in continuing the tribe's tradition.

The women are able to carry out a somewhat ordinary life: they can marry and have children, and they are able to weave, sew and do light work. Although these days, they spend most of their time, making money, by posing as circus freaks for the tourists visiting the hill tribes in Northern Thailand.

Source : www.thaipro.com