They say chocolate makes everything better, and apparently premium wagyu beef is no exception. For the past 10 years, the Mayura Station Farm in southern Australia has been feeding its full-blood wagyu cattle chocolate and other sweets mixed with their regular feed, and the results have been spectacular.

When Scott de Bruin, managing partner at Mayura Station, returned to his father’s farm in the Limestone coast of Australia, in 1998, he knew he wanted to do something special to make their beef stand out from that of other luxury cattle farms around the world. But he didn’t know exactly how he was going to do that, so he consulted a cattle nutrition specialist from Japan and spent two years experimenting with different feed before deciding on the final daily ration for his wagyu cows – a special mix of regular feed, chocolate, gummy bears, strawberries and cream flavored gummy snakes. Each cow eats up to 2 kilograms of ground and partially broken chocolate delivered by Cadbury’s every day.

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Joe Chandler, from Brunswick, Georgia, may just be the only person in the United States of America who doesn’t know who won this year’s presidential election. Two weeks since the final election day, the unconventional artist is still trying very hard to remain oblivious to the result.

It all started when Joe Chandler was invited to a party at a friend’s house on election night, where he figured everyone would be biting their nails waiting to see who will become the next US president. “I was invited to an election party to stay up into the night with everybody gnawing their nails, hanging on and I thought, oh there has to be a better way,” he told Fox News. “All I wanted to do is give myself 24 hours of blissful ignorance.” It turns out that ignorance felt so good that he didn’t want to give it up the next day either, so he has been doing everything in his power to not find out who the president elect is.

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To help Japanese companies better deal with the increasing number of foreigners visiting the country, Panasonic has created an innovative megaphone capable of automatically translating Japanese into English, Chinese and Korean.

Remember that cool universal translator the crew of the Enterprise used to break down language barriers with alien species? Such technology is not yet available in real life, but if Panasonic’s ‘Megahonyaku’ is a sign of things to come, that universal translator doesn’t seem so sci-fi anymore. Megahonyaku is a pun on the Japanese words for ‘megaphone’ and ‘translate’, which actually makes a lot of sense because it’s a megaphone that can translate Japanese into several other languages in real time. When a user speaks Japanese into the megaphone, it recognizes and translates what is being said instantly, and outputs the phrase in English, Chinese or Korean.

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Home made bread has become very popular in Sweden over the last few years, so popular in fact that the country has its very own dough hotel – a place where people can drop off their precious sourdough knowing that it will be cared for properly until they return. No it’s not a joke, such a place actually exists.

Sweden’s first sourdough hotel opened in 2011, at the Urban Deli bakery, in Stockholm. For a fee of 200 Swedish kroner ($22) a week, they offered to take great care of your sourdough, if you couldn’t do it yourself. “We were just sat talking and thought of the idea of a nursery for sourdoughs. Then we took it further and came up with the hotel idea. It was just for fun really, we didn’t think it was going to get this big,” Åsa Johansson of Urban Deli said in an interview, five years ago.

They didn’t get too many paying customers during the first few months, but thanks to a collaboration with Josefin Vargö, a student at the University College of Arts and Crafts and Design (Konstfack) who started a sourdough archive for her master project, they did get to host a collection of dozens of sourdoughs, some of them as old as 130 years. That’s the thing about sourdough, if you take care of it properly, it can last for several generations, probably even indefinitely. And that’s what these uniquely Swedish dough hotels promise to do – keep the dough alive by “feeding” them water and flour, as well as treat them to regular massages.

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If-you’re looking for a painless, non-invasive way to get pointy elf ears, you’re probably going to love these cool-looking earbuds.

The Spirit E666 earbuds are the perfect accessory for elf-loving audiophiles. While earbuds are generally used by people who don’t want to stand out too much, this particular pair will grab a lot of attention due to their unusual shape. These things go into your ears like regular earbuds, but they also act as pointy extensions for the ear lobes, giving you that coveted elf look.

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A couple from Charlotte, North Carolina, has recently been accused of kicking out five of their seven adopted children soon after winning a home makeover on the popular TV show ‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’.

Five years ago, Devonda and James Friday applied for a home makeover on ABC’s hit reality TV show. The couple had seven children, five of whom had just been adopted, and had converted their carport into a temporary bedroom in order to accommodate all the kids. They seemed like the perfect choice for a popular show that focused on helping families in need by renovating their home, but according to two of the Friday’s adopted children, who have long left the renovated family home, it was all just a clever and cruel scam.

The five children adopted by Devonda and James Friday prior to being featured on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, in 2011, were all biological siblings. Back then, the couple expressed their commitment to keeping the fragile family together, and the kids, as well as everybody else believed them. “I just felt like I was home,” Chris, one of the five children, remembers. “I felt like they were my mom and dad. I loved them like they were my real parents. I did.”

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Sick of getting temporarily blinded by drivers using their high-beam headlights at night, more and more Chinese are equipping the rear windows of their cars with scary reflective decals featuring ghosts, vampires or monsters.

Dozens of shops on large e-commerce sites like Taobao are selling scary rear-window decals with graphics ranging from ghostly figures and women with bloody mouths to vampires and yellow-eyed werewolves, and judging by the number of photos currently doing the rounds on Chinese social media, people are actually using them to deter drivers from keeping their high beam headlights on when driving behind them. The bizarre stickers are apparently barely visible in the dark or normal lighting conditions, but light up when a bright light is shone on them.

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A zoo in Dezhou City, east China’s Shandong Province, recently attracted criticism for placing a husky dog in a pen populated by a dozen wolves, as a way to create more fun for tourists.

Chinese animal lovers raised the alarm about the unusual member of the wolf pack after a video shot by a tourist at Dezhou zoo went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter. He explained that he happened to be visiting the zoo when he saw a strange-looking wolf limping around in a pen full of actual wolves. It didn’t take him long to figure out that the animal was some kind of Husky-Alaskan-mix canine.

“As we all know, wolves like living with each other and have a strong sense of territory,” the man, surnamed Huang, wrote in the post. “Don’t you think it would be miserable for the dog to live there?” He also mentioned that the dog was obviously wounded, as it was struggling to walk on just three legs. His video attracted a lot of attention, with the vast majority of commenters accusing the zoo for acting irresponsibly.

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Russian authorities in the city of St. Petersburg recently came under fire after it was discovered that they had used digital editing software like Adobe Photoshop to fake the cleanup of a local lamp post.

Last week, a resident of St. Petersburg submitted a request on the local government official website asking that a lamp post covered with obscene advertising stickers be cleaned. This Tuesday, an employ of the St. Petersburg administration responded to the complaint, letting the person know that the job had been done, even posting a photo of the cleaned up lamp post as proof. It had apparently been scrubbed of advertising materials, but after taking a closer look, a number of users noticed that the infrastructure element depicted in the photo didn’t look quite right.

Zooming into the picture, it was revealed that the lamp post in question had been given the “spray can” treatment to create a two-tone speckled grey effect over the stickers. And as if the shoddy digital cleanup wasn’t obvious enough, someone even noticed a bizarre “blob” of white digital spray paint suspended in mid air by the right of the infrastructure element.

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When most guys attend bachelor parties, the only thing they come home with is a nasty hangover, but groom-to-be Mitchel Craddock and seven of his friends each returned with an adorable puppy.

Craddock of Vicksburg, Michigan, took family and friends to the woods in Tennessee for a 5-day bachelor getaway, but on their first morning there, they noticed a dog outside the front door of their cabin. “We were cooking bacon with the door open. The next thing you know, there’s this dog sitting right at the front door. She wouldn’t come inside, but she sat right there,” he recalled in an interview. “She was very friendly but very skittish— I thought maybe she had been booted out of a house before.” The dog refused their repeated invitations to come inside, but the guys noticed that she was hungry and thirsty, so they offered her food and water, both of which she wolfed down almost instantly.

The dog was so well behaved that Mitchell and his friends were sure that she belonged to someone, but after their first encounter she remained at their cabin. “We’d ride for 4-5 hours, or go into town, and every time we’d come back she would  either be sitting on our doorstep or under one of our trucks,” he told Mlive. He and his friends had noticed that the dog, which they had named Annie,after Little Orphan Annie, had had puppies, but her milk supply had apparently dried up. After three days of regular meals and lost of water, Annie started producing milk again, and seeing her running to the back of the cabin and barking in alarm every time a vehicle went down the road near the woodline, the guys decided to investigate.

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46-year-old Kevin Cottam is not the world’s biggest Star Wars fan, but for the last two years he has never left home without his iconic Jedi robe and trusty lightsaber. He is the UK’s only full-time Grey Jedi.

Cottam says he became a follower of Jediism six years ago, after doing some research online. He had become frustrated by all the rules most religions follow so he decided to look for something more suitable. “Before becoming a Jedi, I was a Zen Buddhist, but I was frustrated with the different precepts and mandates that came with the religion,” he says. “I researched other religions online and came across the Djedi of ancient Egypt, which inspired the Jedi in Star Wars.”

He learned that Jediism didn’t have any holy texts or commandments, only three basic laws: the cycle of knowledge, wisdom and compassion. Through the application of knowledge we gain wisdom, and through wisdom we become compassionate. He felt that this simple principle provided more guidance that thousands of restrictive and often times nonsensical rules ever could. So he decided to ditch Zen Buddhism for Jediism and became a Grey Jedi. “All Jedi believe there is a force that creates everything. But unlike the Jedi and Sith, who see the force as light and dark (ie good and bad), the Grey Jedi see it simply as a natural force. It is how we use the force that dictates whether it is good or evil,” he says.

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The Munich suburb of Neuperlach Sud has nearly completed a giant stone wall meant to separate the local population from around 160 unaccompanied child refugees set to move into a nearby shelter. The 4-meter-high barrier will be taller than the Berlin Wall (3.6 meters).

After the local government decided to build a large refugee shelter approximately 100 meters from a residential estate, the people of Neuperlach Sud went to court to have a stone wall separating their community from the migrants. One of their arguments was the fear that the prices of their homes would plummet if there was nothing to separate them from a group of refugees that could be there for many years. They also expressed concern about the noise that might be coming from their new neighbors. The judge of the Administrative Court in Munich approved their request, and now the large stone wall is almost complete.

“Donald Trump wants to build a wall for Mexico, and we in Munich Neuperlach build one to keep us safe from refugees!” one Neuperlach Sud couple told a local newspaper.

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Students at Benjamin Franklin Elementary School, in Yorktown Heights, New York, have been casting their votes to determine the winner of each presidential election, since 1968, and for the past 48 years, they’ve gotten it right every time.

Every four years,  just days before the actual presidential election, the elementary school sets up mock voting booths and invites its students – from kindergarten to fifth grade – to cast their ballot for the candidate that they think would deserve to become president of the United States of America. But it’s the process leading up to the vote that’s genuinely interesting. The students spend months learning about the candidates, who they only know as ‘Candidate A’ and ‘Candidate B’, focusing on policy and real issues, instead of on their personality and popularity. “We talk about exact facts and issues and put them on two sides of a spreadsheet. Then the students debate the facts in class,” principal Patricia Moore says.

Eventually, the kids are told which candidate they had been siding with, and with this last piece of information in mind, they are ready to cast their vote. The same scenario been unfolding every four years since 1968, since Tom McAdams, a fifth-grade social studies teacher initiated the tradition, and the kids have predicted the result of the election every time.

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It’s not entirely unusual for bosses of successful companies to give out bonuses to employees on major holidays, but how many can claim that they are as generous as Savji Dholakia, CEO of Hari Krishna Exports, who recently gifted some 1,200 cars and 400 apartments to over 1,600 of his most loyal and hardworking staffers.

“If we keep our employees happy, God will keep us happy,” Dholakia says, and while he is certainly not the only boss to claim that he puts his staff first, the man actually puts his money where his mouth is. He started a long streak of generous bonuses 20 years ago, when he gave three of his top employees their own cars, and he has been upping his game every year since then. In 2014,  he distributed Rs 500m (£6m, $7.5m) as performance incentives and last years he gave away 491 cars and 200 apartments, but this year seems to be the most special yet. To celebrate his company’s 25th anniversary, the man known as India’s most generous boss just gave away over 1,260 cars and 400 apartments to over 1,700 of his most valuable employees.

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“Who says that health foods have to taste bad?” That’s the question that inspired Italian cardiologist Dr. Valerio Sanguigni to create a tasty ice-cream with proven health benefits, including improved sport performance in youth.

It’s a known medical fact that can help improve heart health and prevent certain diseases, with some studies even linking them to living a longer life. Staples of Italian cuisine, like olive oil, tomatoes and red wine have been credited for contributing to the longevity of the Italian population, whose number of centenarians has tripled in less than 15 years. But despite their documented benefits, Dr. Sanguini believed that many antioxidant-rich health foods lost a considerable share of their properties before reaching people’s tables. He decided to solve this problem using ice-cream.

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