WTF News: It's Weird, True and Funny

Rediff.com brings for its readers their weekly digest of weird news stories from around the world

An 8-year-old boy from Ireland, dubbed Mini-Hercules, has become an online sensation, thanks to his rippling six-pack abs. 

Brandon Blake received thousands of likes, comments and shares over social media after renowned fitness guru Frank Medrano shared a picture his picture on Facebook, Metro.co.uk reported.

Blake’s dad Mark said that his son who has never lifted weights in his life and his shape has developed over the past year.

He has a healthy diet consisting of cereal for breakfast, fruits throughout the day and meat and greenies for dinner, he added.

The youngster built his impressive physique with help of a technique called ‘calisthenics’, a form of work out that uses just the body’s natural resistance through exercises like sit-ups, pull-ups and push-ups. The 8-year-old, who wants to represent his country at the Olympics, prefers to spend his time on his chin-up bar or trampoline instead of playing.

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A teenage girl broke the world record for longest video game marathon on a massively multiplayer online role-playing game on Sunday.

Kinumi Cati spent 30 hours 31 minutes playing World of Warcraft in a continuous play session and broke the old mark of 24 hours.

The Guinness World Record Attempt took place in “Hotel Tryp Galeones” (Vigo, Galicia).

There were six witnesses present during the record, including a video game expert.

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An amateur artist in London has reportedly spent 10,000 hours or you could say 13 years to transform his two-bed flat into a sci-fi shrine.

One bedroom has been turned into a Flash Gordon shrine, the second is underwater themed complete with sharks and starfish, while the hallway looks like a tomb, the Daily Star reported.

43-year-old business analyst Simon Edwards said that it was a very unusual flat, not to everybody’s taste but he loves it.

He said that paint did not cost much, and painting costs only time and it’s been a fantastic journey for him.

He’s moving to a four-bedroom house a mile down the road for an even bigger project.

But he has promised his wife Jo, 42, a physiotherapist, that this time he will decorate the house without the alien life forms and comic book characters.

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Batman, who first made his debut in Detective Comics No 27 on March 30, 1939 in an issue titled The Case of the Chemical Syndicate, has turned 75.

A year later, he became the subject of DC’s first comic book devoted exclusively to one character, with the release of Batman No 1 in which he first battled the Joker and Catwoman, the BBC reported.

The year 2014 will be filled with new and old releases of Batman items, including the original 1966 TV series on DVD for the first time ever, as well as the animated film, Son of Batman on May 6.

Warner Bros will also be putting out a 25th Anniversary Edition of Tim Burton’s Batman in the fall.

Additionally, the company will also be distributing two brand-new animated short series, which are being produced by Bruce Timm, who did Batman: The Animated Series and Darwyn Cooke of Batman Beyond fame.

Finally, there’s a new TV series coming up called Gotham that will air on Fox and will show commissioner Gordon’s back story.

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The American Chemical Society has come up with a cologne which they claim will help one survive a zombie apocalypse if it ever occurs.

According to ACS’ Adam Dylewski, if a person smells like a rotting corpse, zombies would probably pass, and a few puffs of Eau de Death will help one get that, ABC News reported.

Dylewski acknowledged that zombies don’t exist said they were encouraged to make this as a go ahead to the finale of TV series ‘The Walking Dead’.

Raychelle Burks, the corpse perfume’s mastermind and a chemistry post-doctoral fellow at Doane University in Nebraska said she was inspired by the TV series’ first season and assures that the chemicals, mainly “putrescine” and “cadaverine”, live up to their name.

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A chip shop owner is challenging people to eat what may be the meatiest burger ever with a total of 10,000 calories, and if they finish the treat, they don’t have to pay anything.

Corinne Clarkson, who runs the Mister Eaters Eating Emporium in Preston, Lancashire, has dubbed her creation the ‘Ultimeat-um’ and it consists of a cheeseburger inside another burger and held together by two buns – made from burgers, the Daily Star reported.

Anyone who accepts the challenge will have to much through 5 pounds of beef, six slices of cheese and three entire buns.

Clarkson said that it took her four attempts to get the burger right, but she hasn’t even been tempted yet because it’s massive.

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A nun has captured the attention of the world with her amazing singing voice after she appeared on the talent show ‘The Voice of Italy’.

After 25-year-old Sister Cristina Scuccia sang Alicia Keys’ No One for her ‘blind audition’, she got an immediate standing ovation from the stunned audience and all four coaches expressed their desire to mentor her in upcoming the rounds, stuff.co.nz reported.

While receiving praises from the judge’s, Scuccia said that she came on the show because she has a gift and wants to share it, adding that she wanted to “evangelise”.

The video of the member of the Ursuline Sisters of the Holy Family’s performance has since gone viral.

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A scrap metal dealer based in the US bought a golden egg at a stall for 8,000 pounds before discovering that he had come across a rare Faberge egg worth 20 million pounds.

The egg, which has a Vacheron Constantin watch inside it, was gifted to Empress Maria Feodorovna, in Easter 1887, by her husband Alexander III, Sky News reported.

Unable to sell the egg, the man, who has not been named, despairingly typed “egg” and “Vacheron Constantin” into Google, and found an article quoting Kieran McCarthy, director of Wartski, the London-based Royal Warrant-holding experts on Carl Faberge’s work.

The man then flew to London to show McCarthy photos of his purchase, which left the Faberge expert speechless.

Wartski bought the egg for a private collector and the stunning piece will be put on display for four days in London from April 14.

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A new trend that involves wrapping your face with a sticky sellotape, clicking a picture, and uploading it on internet, has gone viral online.

According to reports, lots of people are wrapping the clear sticky tape to make their faces grotesquely skewed and squashed selves, and then are posting those images on Facebook and Twitter, News.com.au reported.

The originator behind the new internet sensation is believed to be Lizzie Durley, 21, from the UK.

She told a UK website that she got the idea from Jim Carrey’s office scene in ‘Yes Man.’

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A Tibetan mastiff puppy has become the most expensive canine, after it was sold for a whopping $2.09 million in China.

A property developer paid 12 million Yuan for the one-year-old golden-haired mastiff at a “luxury pet” fair in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

The dog’s breeder Zhang Gengyun said that Tibetan mastiffs have lion’s blood and are top-of-the-range mastiff studs and added that another red-haired canine had sold for 6 million Yuan.

The Tibetan mastiff was 80 centimetres tall and weighed 90 kilograms.

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A 44-year-old man, who has been dubbed the most fertile man in Europe after fathering 98 children in just 12 years, is offering a free sex service.

Ed Houben started off by donating his sperm through a fertility clinic, but then he decided that he wanted to do things more traditionally and offered to have sex with women who want to have a baby for free, News.com.au reported.

Houben told the BBC that what motivates him is meeting new people who turn out to be great people and there’s some beautiful hope of creating a new life which will be loved and look after.

Potential clients can contact Houben through his website. Houben, who has a strike rate of 80 percent, has claimed that he doesn’t fire blanks.

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Researchers have discovered that biting flies, including horseflies and tsetse flies, led to the zebras’ evolving stripes.

The research team mapped the geographic distributions of the seven different species of zebras, horses and asses, and of their subspecies, noting the thickness, locations, and intensity of their stripes on several parts of their bodies.

Their next step was to compare these animals’ geographic ranges with different variables, including woodland areas, ranges of large predators, temperature, and the geographic distribution of glossinid (tsetse flies) and tabanid (horseflies) biting flies. They then examined where the striped animals and these variables overlapped.

While the distribution of tsetse flies in Africa is well known, the researchers did not have maps of tabanids (horseflies, deer flies). Instead, they mapped locations of the best breeding conditions for tabanids, creating an environmental proxy for their distributions. They found that striping is highly associated with several consecutive months of ideal conditions for tabanid reproduction.

Why would zebras evolve to have stripes whereas other hooved mammals did not? The study found that, unlike other African hooved mammals living in the same areas as zebras, zebra hair is shorter than the mouthpart length of biting flies, so zebras may be particularly susceptible to annoyance by biting flies.

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A new survey has found that eating breakfast at 7:11 am can help people shed off the kilos.

The survey, conducted by Forza Supplements on 1,000 people, asked dieters to recommend the perfect time to eat, the Daily Express reported.

Lee Smith, managing director of the firm, said that the key for many dieters is not how much they eat but when they do it.

Smith continued saying that they found that the optimum times were 7:11 am for breakfast, 12:38 pm for lunch and 6:14 pm for dinner.

Most dieters recommended these meals be supplemented with low-fat snacks when you get hunger pangs in later morning or mid-afternoon, he added.

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Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have found that goats learn how to solve complicated tasks quickly and can recall how to perform them for at least 10 months.

This might explain their remarkable ability to adapt to harsh environments, the researchers said.

The scientists trained a group of goats to retrieve food from a box using a linked sequence of steps; first by pulling a lever with their mouths and then by lifting it to release the reward.

The goats’ ability to remember the task was tested after one month and again at 10 months. They learned the task within 12 trials and took less than two minutes to remember the challenge.

“The speed at which the goats completed the task at 10 months compared to how long it took them to learn indicates excellent long-term memory,” co-author Dr Elodie Briefer, now based at ETH Zurich said.

Before each learning session, some of the goats had the opportunity to watch another goat to demonstrate the task.

“We found that those without a demonstrator were just as fast at learning as those that had seen demonstrations. This shows that goats prefer to learn on their own rather than by watching others,” Dr Briefer added.

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A new study has found that a person is most likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke at 6:30 am.

Researchers from Boston's Brigham and Women's Hospital and Oregon Health and Science University have blamed the protein, plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1), for the increased risk for cardiovascular events in the morning.

Study author Dr Frank Scheer, from BWH, explained that PAI-1 is at its peak in the body at approximately 6:30 am in a regular 24-hour sleep/wake cycle.

Co-author Dr Steven Shea added that the human circadian system causes a morning peak in circulating levels of PAI-1, independent of any behavioural or environmental influences.

Scheer asserted that it all comes down to our internal body clock when heart attacks and stroke come into the picture. The research is published in the journal Blood.

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