It’s hard to let go of loved ones, especially when they pass away suddenly. But thanks to rapidly evolving artificial intelligence, you soon may not have to let go. Well, not completely, anyway. Case in point, Eugenia Kuyda, the co-founder and CEO of a Russian artificial intelligence startup called Luka Inc, who recently brought her best friend back to life as an AI chatbot.

Kuyda lost her best friend, fellow tech entrepreneur Roman Mazurenko, in November 2015, but just three months after his tragic car accident, she sent the first text message to his AI personality, Roman. With no grave to visit, because he had been cremated, the young programmer, decided to use every digital memory of him, including photos, news articles and thousands of SMS text messages he had sent to her over the years, and feed them into a neural network to create an AI chatbot that many of those who knew Roman say sounds just like him.

“It was the first death for me. I didn’t know how to react, so as soon as I could I shoved everything as deep inside as possible and tried not to feel anything. Half a year later I can say that it doesn’t go away. In the last couple of months our team at Luka managed to build a dialogue model using smaller datasets on top of a neural net. I put together all texts we sent each other, photos, articles about him and we built a Roman AI,” Kuyda wrote in a Facebook post. “You can text with him about his life or just chat like you normally would – he will reply like Roman would have.”

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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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For the past 40 years, Ramon Archundia, has dedicated his life to the preservation of Mexico’s endangered iguanas. His magical ‘iguanario’, a reptile sanctuary in the center of Manzanillo city, is now home to 642 iguanas, as well as other wild animal species.

The story of Iguanario Archundia began over four decades ago. Sickened by the plight of iguanas at the hands of man, Ramon Medina Archundia rescued a pair of these majestic reptiles and set up a small enclosure for them in a marshy space in downtown Manzanillo, where two huamúchil trees offered the perfect place for sunbathing. But that was only the beginning, because Ramon and his father Juan, kept bringing in new rescued iguanas, and after word of their small ‘iguanario’ spread around the city and the whole Mexican state of Colima, other people started bringing in iguanas, knowing that they would be well taken care of. Today, Iguanario Archundia is home to over 640 iguanas, as well as other ‘donated’ animals like raccoons, badgers or turtles.

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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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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 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 »

A dog lover from the Pudong district of Shanghai, recently melted millions of hearts after it was revealed that he has been living on the streets of the Chinese metropolis for a decade, so he could take care of stray canines.

58-year-old Cui Hengyi started caring for injured and abandoned dogs in his city 28 years ago. He wasn’t homeless at the time, so he started bringing them into his home, and claims that at one point, in 2006, he had a whopping pooches living with him. The constant noise and the fear of disease didn’t sit too well with his neighbors, who soon started filing complaints against him. Pressured by the authorities to get rid of the animals or risk getting evicted, Cui decided that having a home wasn’t worth giving up on his furry friends, so he decided to leave his house and family behind and live in the streets to take care of stray dogs.

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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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Chacho’s Taco, a Tex-Mex eatery in Corpus Christi, Texas, has been challenging people to finish a spectacular 4-pound All-Mighty Taco in under 10 minutes ever since its inception, 18 years ago. During that time, only 5 really hungry people have managed to do it.

The next-to-impossible eating challenge posed by Chacho’s Taco recently went viral on social media, after Norma Jean Toro, a Corpus Christi local, posted a photo of her struggling to eat the 4-pound behemoth made with a giant homemade tortilla and lots of beans, cheese, carne guisada, egg, potatoes and bacon. She failed to finish the taco, but won the admiration of the internet instead. Her post has been doing the round on social media around South Texas after receiving thousands of shares on Facebook.

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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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