Cyclist cheats death by changing flights - twice

Maarten de Jonge is a Dutch cyclist riding for the UCI Continental Bike Aid. Surely he's had quite a few near-death situations during his biking career - things like this are unavoidable in traffic. Yet nothing in the life of an average human can be compared to how he cheated death twice when preparing for flights. De Jonge, 31, was scheduled to take both Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 AND Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014. He changed his mind both times, though, so he didn't board any of these flights. The results: one plane crashed in the ocean, one plane shot down in Ukraine, and one cyclist who has survived both times.

Fidel Castro - the leader supremo who cheated death hundreds of times

Fidel Castro was surely a mote in many eyes. Being the leader of one of the last remaining Communist countries is not what you would call a life insurance. During his reign in Cuba, Castro was the target of over 600 assassination attempts, including ones using poisoned cigars, exploding cigars, hidden needles and its likes. Whether his survival can be attributed to luck or the preparedness of his security detail is unknown. Castro survived all the attempts to his life. He passed away on November 25th, 2016, at the age of 90. The cause of his death was not disclosed.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi - the man who survived two atom bombs

Nuclear weapons are so destructive that they only needed to be deployed twice to convince the world that they are too horrible to use. Surviving one of the two would be an achievement on its own. And how about surviving both? Well, that's what happened to Tsutomu Yamaguchi, an oil tanker designer.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a Nagasaki resident, was on a business trip to Hiroshima when the bomb fell. Ironically, he was preparing to leave the city - he was on his way to the train station when he remembered he forgot his hanko (a stamp allowing him to travel) at his workplace.
He was on his way to retrieve it when the Enola Gay dropped the Little Boy, leveling the city. Yamaguchi suffered severe burns, temporarily lost his sight, and suffered eardrum ruptures - but he lived. He returned to his hometown the next day. Three days later, back home, Yamaguchi was describing the blast to his supervisor when Bockscar, the American bomber dropped the Fat Man on the city.
Being two miles away from ground zero, this time he was not harmed by the explosion. Tsutomu Yamaguchi is the only person to have been in both of the explosions and survived. He died in 2010, at the age of 93, of stomach cancer.

The Luckiest People Ever to Be Alive Trying your luck today is easy. You can simply buy a scratch card, a lottery ticket or head over to the Vegas Palms to play the best online slot games and possibly win a fortune. The Vegas Palms has a history of making people richer - its Winner's Wall has a constantly updated list of the significant winners of the day. And even if you don't win, the Vegas Palms will offer you cross-platform fun to take with you wherever you go, so you will always have the chance of feeling like the luckiest bastard of the world. The people below didn't try their luck, though. They didn't play to win - they did nothing more than living their lives as they saw fit. Whether their luck can be attributed to a supreme being or the random collusion of probabilities, we will never know. This doesn't change the fact that they have come out of situations that would've slain and destroyed an average human mostly unharmed.

2016 is starting to draw to a close, so what should we expect from smartphones in 2017.

Augmented Reality

Made popular with Pokemon Go, augmented reality is bound to crop up on plenty of other apps in 2017. Apps and games are likely to make use of this idea to bring us all kinds of new ways of interacting with our phones.

More Location-Based Services

These are only going to rise. More apps are going to use your location to generate content. Whether that is information on your surroundings, games or something we’ve not even thought of yet. Location-based services are only going to increase.

Virtual Reality

As mobile phones begin to run faster they will be able to run applications like virtual reality better. VR can be experienced through Google Cardboard and other similar services at the moment, but we can expect bigger and better things from phones regarding VR. Who knows what is going to be used in VR next. It could be anything from a game like Temple Run to casino apps for Android.

Faster Chips

Phones will need faster chips in order to do things like run VR and as such graphics will smoother and other applications will run faster on 2017 phones. A new Snapdragon chip has been announced and will likely be built into some premium Android smartphones.

UBS-C

2017 is going to see the USB-C replace the micro-USB 2.0 port in Android devices. This new USB form is more versatile and allows for quicker charging, can be used to connect mobiles to monitors, headphones, flash drives and external storage devices. This simple change is going to entirely alter how we use our phones.

Quicker Charging

Thanks to the new USB-C we will see faster charging of mobile phones.With smartphones being able to carry several hours of battery after only being on charge for 5 minutes.

Storage

We have been able to purchase additional storage for phones for a long time and have often needed to as the internal storage is sometimes lacking. Well in 2017 we are going to see more phone models with internal storage that that can top out at 1TB. Likely we’ll see more that are a lot less than this, but it is definitely something to aim for.

Security

Protecting the data on your phone has never been more important and 2017 is going to herald a new age of increased protection for phone users. More apps are going to come with built in security measures and we should all be thankful for it.