The two founders of Scottish brewery BrewDog have both legally changed their names to ‘Elvis’ after being threatened with legal action by the Presley Estate over their grapefruit and blood orange IPA, called Elvis Juice.

Formerly known as James Watt and Martin Dickie, the two Elvises sought to prove that their new name is not exclusive, so they went ahead and got their birth names legally changed, by deed poll. In a witty response to the King of Rocks and Roll’s estate, the two write:  “We’re caught in a trap and suggest the grey-suited hound dogs at the Presley Estate recognise that the name Elvis is not exclusive. So in an effort to patch it up, we’ve changed our names to highlight our burning love for the best grapefruit IPA out there. From this point forward, Elvis Juice is named after us, the brewers formerly known as James and Martin. We may even file a case against Mr Presley for using our names on all his records without our written permission.”

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Andy Pope, a Police Community Support Officer for West Midlands Police, in the UK, has come to be known as memory cop, thanks to his incredible photographic memory, which has helped him successfully identify over 850 suspects in the last four years.

Every day,  PCSO Pope arrives at work half an hour early, logs on to his computer, and browses the pictures of suspects in the day’s internal police briefing. He has been doing it even since he joined the West Midlands Police, in 2008, and as his brain stores more faces year-on-year, his record of recognizing bad guys keeps getting better. His exceptional identification skills have made him somewhat of a secret weapon, and when detectives exhaust all other possible options trying to put a name to a suspect’s face, they turn to him.

 

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Cycling enthusiasts in Lidzbark Warminski, a small town in Northern Poland, have recently received a unique, awesome present from the local authorities – a brand new sun-powered bicycle path that glows bright blue all night long.

Scientists at Polish construction company TPA Instytut Badan Technicznych in Pruszkow created the innovative 100-meter bicycle path using luminophores, a synthetic material that lights up when charged with sunlight. According to TPA president Igor Ruttmar, “The material we used for the track gives light for over ten hours. That means the road can radiate throughout the whole night and reaccumulate light the following day”. Apparently, the new material can emit light in a variety of colors, but designers chose blue because it went well with the surroundings in Lidzbark Warminski.

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A man hiking through the woods in Huntington’s Berkeley Jackson County Park recently came across what he described as a creepy ‘shrine to missing persons’ made up of over a dozen missing persons flyers posted on trees, close to the remnants of a shelter.

James Rankin says that he was hiking through the woods in Long Island when he came across the disturbing display. Instead of freaking out, he took out his smartphone and recorded a video which he later posted on Facebook. The footage went viral very quickly, racking up over 230,000 views in less than 24 hours. In the video, Rankin shows all the different missing persons flyers, who appear to be of people from several U.S. states and keeps wondering who in their right mind would do something like this in the middle of the woods. He ends his creepy adventure by running for his life, saying he hears voices in the area.

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A 12-year-old boy from Spain who dreamed of becoming a popular YouTube entertainer and making lots of money online, signed up for Google’s Adwords promotion program instead of its Adsense revenue program and racked up €100,000 in debt.

Jose Javier, from the town of Torrevieja, in Spain’s Alicante province, dreamed of becoming rich and famous, like his favorite youtubers, so in August, he decided to set up his own YouTube account and register for Google’s lucrative revenue generation program. Only it appears he didn’t know anything about this digital tool, or even its exact name, because instead of opening an account with Adsense, he registered for Adwords, which instead of paying users ad revenue generated by traffic on their webpage or YouTube channel, charges them for promoting products or webpages on the internet. So instead of making money, he was spending it, and fast.

In order to register for Adwords, the wannabe youtuber used a bank account that his parents had set up for him to encourage him to save money. Because of the way that the advertising campaigns were set up in Adwords, advertising fees started piling up very fast, and the €2,000 originally available in the bank account evaporated in a matter of days. When the balance started showing up in the red, bank employees called Javier’s parents and told them that Google was attempting to charge the account for tens of thousands of dollars. The boy’s mother, Inma Quesada, told bank employees to block the transactions, but because Javier’s Adwords account was still active, his debt kept rising.

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For the past five years, 44-year-old Finish-Syrian Rami Adham has dedicated his life to helping the children of Aleppo cope with the horrors of war by smuggling toys into the besieged city.

Rami Adhman was born in Aleppo, but moved to Finland with his family in 1989. When the Syrian civil war started, in 2012, he decided he had to help the children of his native city in any way he could. In the beginning, he never planned on taking toys, thinking that food, medicine, and drinking water were the things that mattered most. However, on one occasion of crossing the border, his daughter told him she wanted to donate her toys to the kids of Aleppo. He took the girl up on her offer, and upon seeing the joy on the Syrian children’s faces when he took the toys out of his backpack, he decided to make them a priority on his subsequent runs.

Adham soon became known as the “toy smuggler” and the “Santa of Syria”. He has so far made the journey from Helsinki to Aleppo 28 times, and doesn’t plan on stopping until the war ends. Until two years ago, he crossed into Syria through the border with Turkey, but after it closed down, he started crossing into the war-torn country illegally, carrying an 80kg bag of toys on his back all the way to Aleppo. It’s a dangerous trip that he has to make by foot, because it’s dangerous to drive through rebel-held and government-held districts. But those aren’t the only forces he has to avoid, as he claims that his humanitarian efforts have also made him a wanted man by ISIS and Shia militias in Syria.

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Twelve South, an American company that specializes in Apple product accessories, recently launched a scented candle that it claims captures the specific smell of a newly-opened Apple computer.

Called “New Mac”, the unique scented candle has notes of mint, peach, basil, lavender, mandarin and sage, which combined closely mimic the smell of a fresh new Apple product. It is made entirely of soy wax “hand poured” in South Carolina, where Twelve South is based. New Mac will burn for 45-55 hours, constantly filling the room with its special scent, which the company claims is longer than the small of an actual new Mac lasts. And, best of all, you can simply pay $24 for a new one, instead of hundreds or thousands of dollars for a new Apple computer.

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The Elysium chair relies on a carbon-fiber skeleton and a combination of electronic joints and bearings to create a sensation of weightlessness for the person sitting in it. This marvel of engineering is being hailed as the ultimate office chair, but it also comes with a hefty price tag of $26,000. Bearing the price tag of a decent car, the Elysium chair seems like the mother of all gimmicks, but if it actually works as described in a recently released promotional video and you really value comfort I’d say it might actually be worth it.

Elysium is the creation of Dr. David Wicket, a British inventor and furniture designer who also carries a PhD in bioengineering. During 10 years of research, he was able to develop an equation that defines posture and gravitational force, which later became the backbone of this innovative chair. According to the chair’s official website, there is a spot between lying and sitting up when your weight is evenly distributed and your body passes through zero gravity. “This results in sensory attenuation which is the principle of flotation therapy,” the website claims, which means it is the most comfortable point and puts the least strain on your back.

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From now on, drivers in Osaka Japan will no longer have to keep their distance when driving behind local sewage trucks to avoid their foul odor. That’s because sewage trucks now smell like delicious chocolate.

Apparently, four Osaka-based companies recently joined forces to come up with a solution to mask the disgusting smell of vacuum trucks commonly used to collect sewage in the Japanese city. Five days ago, they announced that they had met their goal, and that moving forward, sewage trucks will emit a pleasant chocolate smell instead of the dreadful owner they were notorious for.

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69-year-old Santiago Sanchez, from western El Salvador, has been spending his days digging away at a tunnel ever since God told him to do it, 18 years ago. A reporter recently entered the tunnel, but had to exit before reaching the end, due to respiratory problems, so no one really knows how long it really is.

Every morning, at around 3 a.m., Santiago Sanchez goes down a hole into the tunnel he has been digging for nearly two decades and spends the whole day carving away at the rough service. When the day is done, he exits with around 90 pounds of rock and debris. He has sworn to dedicate every waking hour of his life to the bizarre project and fulfill God’s command. The pensioner says that he received a message from the Lord, 18 years ago, telling him to start digging a hole. He took it to heart and hasn’t stopped since.

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Thirty-some years after making their debut as cartoon characters, vehicle-morphing Transformers have finally become a reality, thanks to the efforts of a Turkish company out of Ankara.

The R&D-focused company, called Letvision, recently wowed the internet with a presentation video for their prototype car-transforming robot, ANTIMON. The recently-released footage shows a red BMW M3 being unveiled and remotely driven toward the camera, where it proceeds to transform into a mighty Autobot-like robot. The whole process takes a bit longer than in Michael Bay’s CGI movies, but it’s still mesmerizing to watch.

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Dutch manufacturer VanMoof has come up with a very ingenious way of making sure that its products arrive safely to their customers – printing a flat screen TV on their delivery boxes instead of a bicycle.

VanMoof plans to sell 90 percent of its bicycles online by 2020, but after seeing a considerable number of products getting damaged during deliveries and incurring serious losses, the company was left with two options – rethink its business plan or come up with an effective solution. Luckily, they managed to come up with something so brilliant that it’s bound to be copied by other companies that rely heavily on online sales.

“No matter who was doing the shipping, too many of our bikes arrived looking like they’d been through a metal-munching combine harvester. It was getting expensive for us, and bloody annoying for our customers,” creative director Bex Rad wrote on the company blog. “Earlier this year our co-founder Ties had a flash of genius. Our boxes are about the same size as a (really really reaaaally massive) flatscreen television. Flatscreen televisions always arrive in perfect condition. What if we just printed a flatscreen television on the side of our boxes?”

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You should never judge a pepper by its size, especially when it comes to price. The Aji Charapita chili pepper grows is roughly the size of a pea, but there’s nothing small about its price. A kilogram of this stuff will set you back a whopping $35,000.

Native to the jungles of norther Peru, the Aji Charapita is known as a wild pepper, and has only recently recently being cultivated for commercial use. Used fresh, this tiny pepper is said to have a strong fruity flavor that gives salsas and sauces a tropical taste, but it is mostly used in powdered form to a bit of spiciness to various dishes. Although still fairly unknown in most Western countries, the Aji Charapita is a highly sought-after treat among chili pepper connoisseurs and five-star restaurant chefs.

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Four years ago,  Csanad Szegedi was a deputy leader of the radical nationalist Jobbik party in Hungary, and he blamed Jews as well as the Roma people for his country’s problems. But then he learned he was a Jew himself, and everything changed.

Szegedi was once notorious for his extremist views and anti-Semitic statements, and as a leader of Jobbik, he helped co-found the Hungarian Guard – a paramilitary group that marched through Roma camps wearing black uniforms reminiscent of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross party that ruled Hungary during the Second World War. He was regarded as a rising star in the anti-immigration party Jobbik, the third biggest party in Hungary’s National Assembly, but after making a startling discovery four years ago, Szegedi realized that his life to that point and everything he thought he believed in had all been a lie.

In 2012, the young politician discovered that his own grandmother was Jewish, and had been wearing long sleeves or plasters in the summer to conceal the Auschwitz concentration camp number tattooed on her arm. She was a Holocaust survivor, but Szegedi didn’t even believe the Holocaust had happened. He later described how “shocking” this revelation was to him “First of all because I realized the Holocaust really happened.”

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In a bid to convince drivers in Aichi Prefecture to keep their hands on the wheel and their eyes on the road, a new Japanese smartphone app offers free coffee coupons to drivers who don’t check their phones for at least 100 km.

For the last 13 years, Aichi Prefecture has recorded the highest rate of traffic fatalities in Japan. Last year, there were 443,691 accidents that resulted in injuries or deaths, and 50,101 arrests involving the use of smartphones while driving. With handhelds becoming such a big part of people’s lives, there appears to be an increase in violations of this nature, and authorities have yet to come up with an effective plan to combat the problem.

Interestingly, a trio of Japanese company seem to think that an ingenious new app could incentivize drivers to restrain themselves from checking their phones at the wheel and reduce the number of traffic accidents. Toyota Motor Corporation, Komeda Co Ltd and KDDI Corporation have teamed up to create Driving Barista, an app that uses the phone’s gyro sensor to sense the tilt of the device, and the GPS to determine the distance driven. This allows it to calculate the number of kilometers a driver has traveled with the smartphone facing down.

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