Believe it or not, the best answer to your dog’s shedding problem may be a pair of skin-tight leotards. Reminiscent of 1980’s aerobic outfits, the Shed-Defender is a canine leotard that is supposed to keep falling hairs from covering your entire home.

Tyson Walters, founder of Shed Defender, recently revealed  that he came up the idea for the funny-looking leotard after failing to find an effective solution to his own dog’s shedding issue. “I had this huge Saint Bernard, called Harley, and I just couldn’t control her shedding,” he said. No matter how much I brushed and groomed her, she still left tumbleweeds of hair everywhere. I looked around on the internet and dog stores and I couldn’t find a solution to my product, so I decided to make one.”

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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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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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Convinced that women have more job opportunities than men, a 30-year-old Chinese man decided to get breast implants to increase his odds of finding employment.

The man, surnamed Ho, had been struggling to find a job for months, when he became convinced that looking more like a woman would make things a lot easier for him. News reports kept mentioning that women had better career opportunities than men, so he somehow got it in his head that getting breast implants that would make him appear more feminine would convince employers to give him a chance, despite his limited work experience.

Unable to afford the breast enlargement surgery, Ho borrowed over 39,000 Yuan ($5,850) in August and traveled from his home city of Zhuzhou to the Ruilan Medical Cosmetic Hospital, in Changsha, for the operation. Everything went according to plan until he came back home with his new pair of perky breasts. He hadn’t told his family about his intentions, and when they laid eyes on his chest for the first time, they got the shock of their lives. Read More »

Abner Browns barbershop, on Rathgar Road, Dublin, is considered one of the most interesting places to visit in all of Ireland. The old-school barbershop charm plays a role in its insane popularity, but what really sets it apart from any other barbershop in the world is the fact that it doubles as a live music bar.

Abner Browns has been in business for 17 years, but its incredible transformation occurred three years ago, when owner Dave Judge decided to work in the barbershop full-time, after losing a lot of money he had invested in property during the financial crash of 2007-2008. While redecorating the place, he bought an old leather couch for about €30, and after setting it next to some guitars and music posters that served as decorations, he told his wife that it would be cool to get someone to play on it. A few days later, Canadian singer/songwriter Blair Packhem walked into Abner Browns for a haircut and Judge asked him if he would play a few songs on his new couch. Patrons loved the idea, and as news of the spontaneous gig spread around the city, Tim Fernley, a friend of Judge’s and member in a number of local bands, asked if he could play in the barbershop. And it just snowballed from there.

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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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Colma, a quiet Californian town of roughly two square miles is home to 1,700 living residents and over 1.5 million dead ones. Most of the town’s forever-silent population are people who lived and died in San Francisco, but, just like most of today’s living residents, couldn’t afford to spend their afterlives in the expensive metropolis.

In the year 1900, San Francisco was a city crowded by the dead. During the gold rush, gold miners, merchants and immigrants from all around the world  flocked here in search of a better life, bringing with them disease, and as the death toll rose, the 27 cemeteries filled to the brink of overflowing. They were considered a health hazard, but most importantly, they were taking up a large chunk of prime real-estate, so in 1902, the City and the County Board of Supervisors banned further burials in the city and forced larger cemeteries like Laurel Hill and Calvary Cemetry to move their residents outside the city. The fight to keep the dead in their original resting places lasted a few decades, but by 1942, only two cemeteries remained in San Francisco – The San Francisco National Cemetery and the Mission Dolores Cemetery. They are still around today, but neither is accepting new burials.

Over 150,000 dead bodies were moved from San Francisco to the small town of Colma, a small community established in 1892, when Archbishop Patrick Riordan decided to create a new necropolis in a valley five miles south of The City. The small field of potatoes that he blessed as the site of the new Catholic Cemetery would go on to become the world’s only incorporated town where the dead outnumber the living.

The Syrian city of Aleppo is probably the most dangerous place to be living in right now, but while many of its residents have left their homes to escape the war, one man has remained behind to care for the hundreds of abandoned and stray cats.

Known as “the cat man of Aleppo”, Mohammad Alaa Jaleel has been taking care to stray felines ever since people planning to leave the city started leaving their pets in his care, knowing he loved cats. As the fighting and bombing intensified, more and more frightened animals started approaching him for food and protection, and he was always more than happy to provide them with both.  Mohammed says he started taking care of about 20 to 30 cats, but the number of feline refugees at his walled sanctuary has now swollen to over one hundred.

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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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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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While millions of people around the world eagerly awaited the release of Apples’s new iPhone 7, dozens of attendants at the Fireside Gathering – a no-phone, no-reception event held at a summer camp two hours west of Ottawa – had to make due with a “revolutionary NoPhone Air, a simple phone package with nothing but air inside.

“We are very proud to introduce the least-advanced NoPhone ever,” inventors Chris Sheldon and Van Gould told Fireside Gathering attendees on September 10th. “We took away the headphone jack. And then we took away everything else. It may look like nothing is in this packaging. But that’s what’s so beautiful about it.”

Sheldon and Gould are part of a growing smartphone-resistant counterculture, and claim they came up with the idea for the NoPhone after seeing everyone at a rooftop bar in New York with their eyes glued to their smartphones. “The NoPhone was created to combat the rapid decline of real life social engagement that has stemmed from chronic smartphone use. It’s sleek, plastic design serves as an idle hand’s security blanket and is devised to alleviate the constant need humans have to hold a mobile device without preventing users from fully experiencing their immediate surroundings,” they wrote on the NoPhone official site.

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In case you needed any more proof that life is unfair, a dog managed to get his paws on an iPhone 7 before you. In fact, she got eight of them, as a gift from her wealthy owner, the son of China’s richest man.

Photos doing the rounds on Chinese social media show Coco, a gorgeous Alaskan Malamute, posing with a stack of brand new iPhone 7s that her master, 28-year-old Wang Sicong bought just for her. You’d think she’d be happier about getting such an expensive gift on the day Apple’s iPhone 7 went on sale, but Coco doesn’t seem to impressed. Too bad she can’t read all the comments from users complaining that their lives are so much worse than hers. Maybe then she could appreciate these “little” gestures more.

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