Twelve-year-old Nikolai Kryaglyachenko can now attract metal objects after receiving a severe electric shock.
Update: Sadly, after some further digging it looks as though this is most likely a hoax. In other words you can sto sticking forks in your electrical sockets as it’s not going to do much else besides hurt. A lot. And maybe kill you.
Original Story: Perhaps the oldest, most cliché of all comic characters origins is the one where some random person gets hit with an abundant amount of some energy or force (usually radiation) and then finds themselves decked out with an arsenal of powers and abilities that they then use to defend/vandalize the world. It’s the sort of idea that you don’t see as often nowadays, mostly on account of the fact that it’s pretty danged silly.
Then again, the real world can sometimes surprise you. Take, for instance, the recent case of Nikolai Kryaglyachenko. A 12-year-old resident of Russia, he was walking home one day when he stopped to lean against an innocuous looking lamppost. Unknown to Kryaglyachenko, the lamppost contained a faulty wire which promptly shocked him with enough electricity to send him flying across the street. And this is where things took a turn for the abnormal.
Nikolai survived his run-in with the lamppost but woke up to discover that his body now possessed a mild quality of magnetism. “When I came round, I felt groggy, but managed to get home and told my mum what had happened,” he explained. “When I woke up the next day and got out of bed, I found some coins that had been lying on the mattress had stuck to my body. Then when I was having breakfast and dropped my spoon, it stuck to my chest.” Being something of a comic book fan, Kryaglyachenko immediately began experimenting with his new powers. Sadly for the budding Magneto, he soon discovered that he had little personal control over his magnetism, though he can apparently pass it on temporarily to people in his close proximity.
This, of course, isn’t the first time that a human being has acquired this sort power over metal. Following the 1986 Cherobyl, another Russian family exhibited similar magnetic properties. There was even a “human magnets” conference held in Bulgaria in 1990 where one attendee was apparently able to suspend 15 pound weights from the flat palms of her hands. It’s worth noting, of course, that these claims of human magnetism come with a lot of skepticism from the scientific community. That said, here’s hoping that our universe might, just this once, be even a fraction as awesome as Marvel’s.
Source: The New York Post
Published: Nov 20, 2014 07:00 pm