Blog Posts by Nadine Kalinauskas

In January, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and his brother, Doug, launched the "Cut the Waist Challenge," a weight-loss plan to lose 50 pounds in six months. They would track their progress with public weekly weigh-ins.

"Enough's enough," Rob said at his first weigh-in. "It's the heaviest I've ever been. And Doug and I went down to Florida and we just discussed it. I've got young children, and this is not healthy. You can't be running the city, you can't be doing all this, at 330 pounds. You guys know it, I know it."

The Fords even encouraged — somewhat tactlessly — other mayors to join the effort.

"The first mayor we might target is our friend over in Calgary [Naheed Nenshi], because he has a little beef on the front of him," Doug challenged at the time.

The brothers also targeted New York City's Michael Bloomberg. His spokesperson did not sound impressed:

"Mayor Bloomberg exercises daily and very avidly watches what he eats — two reasons why he's about as thin as he was in college 50 years

On Sunday, Garret Doherty, 33, defeated his own world record at the UK backwards running championships in Manchester.

Doherty completed the backwards mile-long race in just 6 minutes and 57 seconds, beating the second-place contestant by almost a minute and besting his previous world-record time by more than 30 seconds.

"I'm thrilled that I managed to keep my title, and I'm chuffed to bits that I've beaten my personal best time," he told The Sun.

"I'm hoping to get it down even further by next year though."

Last month, Doherty completed the Wexford half marathon in 1 hour and 40 minutes.

Watch Doherty demonstrate his sport below:

Doherty, from Ireland, started backwards running — also known as retro running — three years ago when he turned around during a jog to avoid the sun's glare.

"It's truly liberating, and there are enormous health benefits. It's much better for your body than running forwards, as it's lower impact," he said.

Doherty has since dedicated his life to sharing the

A stray dog, now known as Xiao Sa, followed a team of cyclists for 24 days, following their 1,833-km route from Kangding, Sichuan province, China, to Lhasa, Tibet.

No one knows where the small white dog came from. Xiao Sa quickly became an Internet sensation after one cyclist launched the microblog Go Go Xiao Sa to chronicle the long journey.

"She was lying, tired, on the street around Yajiang, Sichuan province," cyclist Zhang Heng, 22, told China Daily. "So we fed her, and then she followed our team.

The cyclists quickly embraced the dog as their race mascot with Xiao Sa following along their route, running on dirt roads and climbing 12 mountains.

"Many people stopped cycling in some sections, then took the bus, but the dog made it," Zhang said, calling the stray canine a "buddy and a friend."

"She followed us for three days, running behind our team but sometimes leading us. She's very smart and knows the route, because she never got lost even when we passed through mountains," said

When he was 14, Reid Williamson received an atlas outlining each of the counties in the United States.

Now 64, Williamson is one of 32 "completers" in the Extra Miler Club, having visited all 3,143 U.S. counties.

The Washington Post's John Kelly profiles the Delaware man and his decades-long quest to see his country. To see each of Alaska's counties, Williamson had to take three separate trips, one of which involved a whopping 29 flights.

He has crossed 107 of the country's state-to-state borders and had almost completed his mission to visit all 370 colonial churches on the Eastern seaboard.

Williamson's bucket-list-like journey to the nooks and crannies of his country isn't just motivated by a checklist:

"I travel for the purpose of seeing the face of the Earth," he told Kelly in the Washington Post, admitting that some of the counties — specifically the vast open, wasteland-like stretches in Kansas, Oklahoma and Texes — he'd never have seen had it not been for his self-imposed

Last month, Italian doctors saved the life of a 16-month-old boy by implanting the world's smallest artificial heart until a donor was available for a heart transplant.

The doctors at Rome's Bambino Gesu hospital made the successful operation public this week.

The child was suffering from dilated myocardiopathy, a heart muscle disease, and had already undergone the insertion of — and subsequent infection surrounding — a mechanical pump to support the function of his own heart.

"The device, a titanium pump weighing only 11 grams and that can endure a flow of up to 1.5 litres per minute, was used in an emergency case of a 16-month-old infant suffering from dilated myocardiopathy with a serious infection of the ventricular assistance device that had been implanted previously," surgeon Antonio Amodeo told the AFP.

Comparatively, an adult-sized artificial heart weighs 900 grams. The device was invented by the creator of the first permanent total artificial heart, American Robert Jarvik, and

A team of engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology may have put an end to the frustrated thumping of the bottom of the Heinz bottle, with a new invention that allows thick sauces to smoothly pour out of bottles.

MIT doctoral candidate Dave Smith and his team of mechanical engineers and nanotechnology researchers solved everybody's greatest burger-dressing program with LiquiGlide, "a slippery coating made of nontoxic, FDA-approved materials that can be applied to the insides of food packaging, such as ketchup and mayonnaise bottles, and honey jars," MSNBC reports.

Smith claims that the LiquiGlide "could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year."

See other demos here.

Smith and his team aren't revealing what LiquiGlide is made of, "but we've patented the hell out of it," Smith told Fast Company. Bottle companies are already in talks with the LiquiGlide inventors.

LiquiGlide, which Smith says is "kind of like a structured liquid," has

It's a creative — and attractive — solution to a graffiti problem.

Neighbours Elly Dowson and Christine Liber in Toronto's Wychwood neighbourhood were tired of the tags that marked most of the garage doors in their laneway.

In Toronto, property owners face fines for having graffiti on their property, even when they're victims of vandalism. Instead of fighting the frustrating bylaw, the friends decided to counter the tags with their own urban art: they covered the graffiti with colourful murals on 21 garage doors between Kenwood Avenue and Wychwood Avenue — with permission from the home owners, of course — turning their laneway into "a living art gallery."

They offered their painting services free of charge. A local paint store donated the paint.

"Painting 21 murals on 21 garage doors in 21 days, they transformed an under-appreciated space into a public gallery and brought a new sense of pride and community to their neighbourhood. Now that spring is here, they're at it again, expanding

In July, 2008, Vince Li beheaded fellow bus passenger Tim McLean on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba.

Li, who believed he was on a God-sent quest to save people from an alien attack, was found not criminally responsible for McLean's death.

Instantly, he was catapulted into Canadian infamy.

Now, almost four years later, Li is talking about that day. Granting an interview to Chris Summerville, CEO of the Schizophrenia Society of Canada, Li speaks of the shame and guilt that followed the attack once he began treatment for his then-unidentified schizophrenia.

Summerville said that "unjustified public fears" about Li will likely keep him in a mental-health hospital longer than necessary.

McLean's mother would disagree, considering Li's earlier release from a mental-health institution gave him the freedom to kill her son.

The interview is a fascinating look inside the mind of the man dubbed a monster, whose supervised excursions from the Selkirk Mental Health Centre outraged Canadians. The