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Folding Bike
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9_XEgGQBkQ
Student Dominic Hargreaves has been shortlisted for this year’s James Dyson Award and a chance to pocket a cool £10,000 for his design of a folding bicycle that neatly tucks within the circumference of both of its 26 inch wheels. It reportedly takes about 20 seconds to fold and unfold, though we suspect that overly enthusiastic nitwits will likely stump themselves on the origami-like process like so many drunken IKEA furniture assemblers.
30 Cool Graphic Résumés
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10 People with Unbelievable Medical Conditions


1. The Woman Who has 200 Orgasms every day
UK’s Sarah Carmen, 24, is a 200-a-day orgasm girl who gets good, good, GOOD vibrations from almost anything. She suffers from Permanent Sexual Arousal Syndrome (PSAS), which increases blood flow to the sex organs. “Sometimes I have so much sex to try to calm myself down I get bored of it. And men I sleep with don’t seem to make as much effort because I climax so easily.”
She believes her condition was brought on by the pills. “Within a few weeks I just began to get more and more aroused more and more of the time and I just kept having endless orgasms. It started off in bed where sex sessions would last for hours and my boyfriend would be stunned at how many times I would orgasm. Then it would happen after sex. I’d be thinking about what we’d done in bed and I’d start feeling a bit flushed, then I’d become aroused and climax. In six months I was having 150 orgasms a day—and it has been as many as 200.”
She and her boyfriend split— and new partners struggle to keep up with her sex demands. “Often, I’ll want to wear myself out by having as many orgasms as I can so they stop and I can get some peace,” she said.
2. The Man Who Can’t Get Fat
Mr Perry, 59, can eat whatever he likes – including unlimited pies, burgers and desserts – and never get fat. He cannot put on weight because of a condition called lipodystrophy that makes his body rapidly burn fat.
He used to be a chubby child, but at age 12 the fat dropped off “almost over night”. He initially tried to eat more to gain weight, but it had no effect. Mr Perry, of Ilford in Essex, endured a decade of tests before the illness was diagnosed. It finally emerged that his body produces six times the normal level of insulin. Doctors have admitted that the condition would be a “slimmer’s dream”.
3. The Man Who Doesn’t Feel Cold
Dutchman Wim Hof, also known as the Iceman, is the man that swam under ice, and stood in bins filled with ice. He climbed the Mt. Blanc in shorts in the icy cold, harvested world records and always stands for new challenges.
Scientists can’t really explain it, but the 48-year-old Dutchman is able to withstand, and even thrive, in temperatures that could be fatal to the average person.
4. The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep: stayed awake 24 hours a day for years
Rhett Lamb is often cranky like any other 3-year-old toddler, but there’s one thing that makes him completely different: he has a rare medical condition in which he can’t sleep a wink.
Rhett is awake nearly 24 hours a day, and his condition has baffled his parents and doctors for years. They took clock shifts watching his every sleep-deprived mood to determine what ailed the young boy.
After a number of conflicting opinions, Shannon and David Lamb finally learned what was wrong with their child: Doctors diagnosed Rhett with an extremely rare condition called chiari malformation.
“The brain literally is squeezed into the spinal column. What happens is you get compression, squeezing, strangulating of the brain stem, which has all the vital functions that control sleep, speech, our cranial nerves, our circulatory system, even our breathing system,” Savard said.
5. The Girl Who is Allergic to Water
Teenager Ashleigh Morris can’t go swimming, soak in a hot bath or enjoy a shower after a stressful day’s work – she’s allergic to water. Even sweating brings the 19-year-old out in a painful rash.
Ashleigh, from Melbourne, Australia, is allergic to water of any temperature, a condition she’s lived with since she was 14. She suffers from an extremely rare skin disorder called Aquagenic Urticaria – so unusual that only a handful of cases are documented worldwide.
6. The Woman Who Can’t Forget
That’s the story of AJ, an extraordinary 40-year-old married woman who remembers everything.
McGaugh and fellow UCI researchers Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker have been studying the extraordinary case of a person who has “nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic” memory of her personal history and countless public events. If you randomly pick a date from the past 25 years and ask her about it, she’ll usually provide elaborate, verifiable details about what happened to her that day and if there were any significant news events on topics that interested her. She usually also recalls what day of the week it was and what the weather was like.
The 40-year-old woman, who was given the code name AJ to protect her privacy, is so unusual that UCI coined a name for her condition in a recent issue of the journal Neurocase: hyperthymestic syndrome.
7. The Girl Who Eats Only Tic Tacs
Meet Natalie Cooper, a 17-year-old teenager who has a mystery illness that makes her sick every time she eats anything. Well, almost anything. She can eat one thing that doesn’t make her sick: Tic tac mint!
For reasons that doctors are unable to explain, Tic tacs are the only thing she can stomach, meaning she has to get the rest of her sustenance from a specially formulated feed through a tube.
8. The Musician Who Can’t Stop Hiccupping
Chris Sands, 24, from Lincoln, hiccups as often as every two seconds – and sometimes even when he is asleep. He has tried a variety of cures, including hypnosis and yoga, but nothing has worked. Mr Sands thinks his problem stems from an acid reflux condition caused by a damaged valve in his stomach. “If the acid levels are severe enough they are going to do keyhole surgery and grab part of my stomach and wrap it around the valve to tighten it,” he said.
Mr Sands, who is a backing singer in the group Ebullient, said the condition has hampered his career as he has only been able to perform four times. In the next couple of weeks –as of the day of the report–, doctors at Nottingham’s Queen’s Medical Centre will put a tube into his stomach to monitor acid levels and decide if keyhole surgery is possible.
9. The Girl That Collapses Every Time She Laughs
Kay Underwood, 20, has cataplexy, which means that almost any sort of strong emotion triggers a dramatic weakening of her muscles. Exhilaration, anger, fear, surprise, awe and even embarrassment can also cause sufferers to suddenly collapse on the spot.
Kay, of Barrow-upon-Soar, Leicestershire (UK), who was diagnosed with the condition five years ago, once collapsed more than 40 times in a single day. She said: “People find it very odd when it happens, and it isn’t always easy to cope with strangers’ reactions. ”
Like most cataplexy sufferers, Ms Underwood is also battling narcolepsy – a condition that makes her drop off to sleep without warning. Narcolepsy affects around 30,000 people in the UK and about 70 per cent of them also have cataplexy.
10. The Woman Who is Allergic to Modern Technology
For most people talking on a mobile phone, cooking dinner in the microwave or driving in a car is simply part of modern living in 21st century Britain. But completing any such tasks is impossible for Debbie Bird – because she is allergic to Cell Phones and Microwaves.
The 39-year-old is so sensitive to the electromagnetic field (emf) or ’smog’ created by computers, mobile phones, microwave ovens and even some cars, that she develops a painful skin rash and her eyelids swell to three times their size if she goes near them. As a consequence, Mrs Bird, a health spa manager, has transformed her home into an EMF-free zone to try and stay healthy. ‘I can no longer do things that I used to take for granted,’ Mrs Bird said. “My day-to-day life has been seriously affected by EMF”.
Origin of Famous Names
There are many companies / brands / products whose names were derived from strange circumstances.
Mercedes – This was actually the financier’s daughter’s name.
Adobe – This came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.
Apple Computers – It was the favorite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 O’clock.
CISCO – It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.
Compaq – This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.
Corel – The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr. Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.
Google – The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders- Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’
Hotmail – Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” – the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.
Hewlett Packard – Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.
Intel – Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.
Lotus (Notes) – Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapoor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Microsoft - Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.
Motorola – Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.
ORACLE – Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.
Sony - It originated from the Latin word ’sonus’ meaning sound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.
SUN – Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.
Yahoo! – The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.































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