Biohackers are always looking for new ways to enhance their bodies with implantable technology, even if it’s for aesthetic purposes only. The newest augmenting trend involves having LED lights under the skin.

A group of three biohacking aficionados recently had a device called Northstar V1 implanted under the skin of their hands. About the size of a small coin, the chip is designed to emulate bioluminscence, the kind of light naturally produced by fireflies and some jellyfish. When activated by a magnet, the Northstar’s high-definition LEDs will light up in the shape of a star. The device is made up of a printed circuit board with five red Surface-Mounted-Device Light-Emitting Diodes (SMD LEDs) that become activated for 10 seconds whenever a magnet is placed near the included sensor. It is coated in silicone and powered by a 3 volt battery.

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Patrons dining at Lefty’s Restaurant, in Cape Town, South Africa, can relax and enjoy their meal knowing that their car is protected by a nunchuck-wielding karate master known only as Master Lolo.

Car guards are quite popular in many South-African cities, charging drivers a fee to look over their vehicles and keep them safe from thieves while they are dining or shopping. But no car guard is more famous than Master Lolo, a Congolese balaclava-wearing, nunchuck-wielding karate master hanging out in front of Lefty’s Restaurant, on Harrington Street, in cape Town. The 36-year-old has become a local celebrity, with people showing their gratitude for his services by posting videos of him in action on sites like YouTube.

“People need their cars protected and I have the ability to make the area safe. I am very good at it and will do it for as long as I am needed,” he told the Daily Voice. He admits that the area is very quiet and that so far he has only had to move people along instead of fighting them, but claims that’s probably because of his reputation. “People know not to make trouble here,” he said.

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A Spanish doctor who went missing 20 years ago and was declared dead by authorities 14 years later, after nothing was seen or heard of him, was recently found living deep in a forest in Tuscany, by a couple of villagers foraging for mushrooms.

Carlos Sánchez Ortiz de Salazar, who should now be 47-years-old, disappeared from his home in Seville, Spain, in 1996, after falling into a deep depression. His family spent years looking for him, but after being unable to find any kind of clues to what had happened, they eventually gave up, and Spanish authorities declared him dead in 2010. However, two weeks, ago, a man claiming to be Sánchez Ortiz de Salazar was found living in a forest outside Scalino, a town in Tuscany, by two local mushroom pickers.

The two foragers had gone into the forest hoping to find some mushrooms after a weekend of heavy rainfall, but after having little luck, they decided to stray off the beaten path in order to change their fortune. But instead of mushrooms, they discovered a trail of plastic bottles and water canisters which eventually led them to the camp of a man who they say had “a dirty face and large beard”.

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Meet Alan Whitman and Andrew Masters – the guys who refused to grow up but got rich anyway. They’ve made a killing out of marketing a one-of-a-kind spray called ‘Liquid Ass’, which makes anything smell as bad as it sounds!

The product was born several years ago when Whitman was in high school – his parents had gifted him a chemistry kit and he used the ingredients to invent a smell that had a whiff of “butt crack, kind of sewer smell, with a little hint of dead animal in there.” He used it to play a prank on an English teacher he wasn’t very fond of, and that’s when he realised that what he had on his hands was a real weapon.

But the concoction wasn’t useful to him until about 10 years ago, when he was about to get fired from a truck manufacturing company. Things got pretty bad between him and the management, so along with his friend Masters, he decided it was time to bring out his trusty old weapon again.

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An unidentified Chinese man’s wedding pictures recently went viral because of his unusual bride – a life-size plastic love doll!

The ‘bride’ was apparently treated to a make-up artist, a hair stylist, and even given a selection of dresses to pose in, to make her look like a real girl. She’s seen in a splendid white mermaid gown in the wedding portraits, and a beautiful lilac dress with sequins and precious stones in other photographs. Each picture is surprisingly tender, as though they’re a couple deeply in love.

With the identity of the man kept a secret, no one knew the real reason behind the bizarre wedding. The photographer said that she didn’t really agree with the man’s choice to marry a plastic doll, but added that he still deserved to be respected since we all have the freedom to choose what we like.

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One of the dire problems faced by homeless people across America is the shortage of public showers and toilets. Unofficially dubbed one of the homeless capitals of the nation, San Francisco’s 6,500 homeless have access to only about 16 to 20 shower stalls. But Lava Mae, a San Francisco nonprofit, is trying to make a difference by converting retired city buses into mobile shower stations.

Lava Mae is the brainchild of former marketing executive Doniece Sandoval, who, moved by the plight of the homeless around her, quit her job to help them. “One day I passed a woman in the street and she was very dirty and basically crying, and I heard her say that she would never be clean.” Sandoval told ABC News. “There’s obviously a lot of layers but I was wondering what her opportunities were to actually get clean.”

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I’ve heard of people buying extra pairs of their favorite jeans, but a Louisiana veterinarian has actually gone and gotten himself two extra copies of his favorite dog! Phillip Dupont spent over $100,000 cloning his beloved pet dog Melvin because he simply couldn’t bear to part with him.

Phillip had Melvin cloned about two years ago, and he now has two identical dogs – Ken Gordon, named after his uncle, and Henry Fontenot, named after his friend – with the same traits and characteristics as Melvin. The pups were around for the last year of Melvin’s life, who was nearly 12 when Dupont had to put him down last year, due to his failing health.

Ken and Henry have now replaced Melvin as fixtures at Dupont’s clinic in Lafayette. “They’re maturing into the dog that Melvin was,” said Paula, Phillip’s wife. “I used to tell people that Melvin was the office greeter – my office manager. Ken’s kind of taken his place. Henry has stepped up and is also greeting people. Now they have two dogs meeting people – standing up and putting their paws on my desk.”

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Meet Rolf Bantle, a Swiss football fan who lived on the streets of Milan, Italy, for over a decade just because he lost his way after a match! 

As it turns out, Bantle used to be a resident of an alcoholics’ rehabilitation center in Läufelfingen in the canton of Basel-Country. He had been on a day trip to the San Siro stadium in Milan, on August 24, 2004, to watch his home team FC Basel play Inter Milan, in a Champions League match. But by the end of the match, he was reported missing, as he failed to show up at the bus that had transported him and his fellow Swiss football fans to the stadium. They left home without him.

Bantle, 71, recently told  a Swiss newspaper his version of events – he had visited the toilet at the stadium that fateful day, where he became disoriented and could not locate his friends. “I was suddenly in a different sector,” he said. “I had about 20 euros in my pocket and no phone so I wandered into Milan. People gave me food and cigarettes, and one student offered me a sleeping bag.” 

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We all know we need to drink water to survive, but one man claims he drank his last sip of water, or any kind of liquids for that matter, over three years ago. And, yes, he’s till very much alive.

Peter Filak, a former registered nurse and current webcam model, says he had his last sip of water on May 5th, 2012. He has had a few slips in the early days of his liquid-free lifestyle – some sodas and chocolate milks – but after managing to control his urges, he has relied solely on fruits and vegetables for his nutrition and hydration needs. “Especially as I went into a raw fruit and vegetable diet, I’d be waking up two to three times a night to pee. So it just didn’t make sense to me. I didn’t understand why I had to be drinking all that water,” Filak wrote on his website, More Apples a Day.

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Parents in Naples, Florida, can no rely on a new tool to teach their misbehaving children a lesson – a creepy 65-year-old clown called Wrinkles.

Sporting a scary clown mask, a polka dot onesie and black rubber gloves, Wrinkles is definitely an unnerving sight, which is exactly what he is going for and what makes him so popular. In the few years since he adopted this creepy persona, the 65-year-old man hiding behind the gloomy mask has carved out a niche for himself, either attending birthdays, bar mitzvahs, funerals or whatever kind of events that require the presence of a spooky clown with hollowed out black eyes. And business is good, as Wrinkles told local reporters that he is booked through January.

One of Wrinkles’ latest endeavors involves scaring misbehaving children out of their minds.  He was recently hired by a mother to teach her trouble-making 12-year-old son a lesson. “He was scared of clowns and I showed up across the street from him at the bus stop and he just started crying in front of his friends and ran home,” the creepy-looking character said. “His mother called back a few days later and said ‘Thank you!’ Now when he acts bad, she just has to ask him: ‘Do you want Wrinkles to come back?’ ”

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Ever since she left university, Hannah Shaw has dedicated her life and career to rescuing kittens. The 28-year-old now calls herself a “neonatal kitten warrior” who specialises in fostering abandoned newborn cats that would otherwise end up dead at shelters in Washington D.C. In the past eight years, she’s saved at least ‘a few hundred kittens’ from this terrible fate.

Shaw revealed that her passion for animals began at the age of 12, when she decided to quit eating meat. Since then, she’s been involved in several campaigns to protect various species – right from farm animals to big cats in sanctuaries. She started working with kittens, specifically, about eight years ago after she happened to rescue a “teeny tiny kitten” from a tree. She nestled the kitty in her shirt, took her home, named her Coco, and raised her on her own.

The incident compelled Shaw to look more closely at the plight of kittens in her neighborhood. “After rescuing Coco, I started seeing more kittens outside,” she said. “I also started getting calls from people saying they’d found a kitten and were asking me for help. It became a very fast, cumulative thing where I began learning more about kittens while also honing my kitten eyes, so like anytime I was outside and there was a kitten within a thousand feet of me, I’d hone in on her.”

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ChefCuisine is a new kitchen gadget that’s all set to revolutionise (read: eliminate) home cooking. Thanks to this offering from Swiss startup Nutresia, pretty much anyone can produce restaurant quality food at the touch of a button!

The machine, inspired by Nestle’s coffee capsule Nespresso machines, is capable of preparing fancy dishes from vacuum packed capsules or sachets. Each sachet contains a microchip that tells ChefCusine the exact cooking time and temperature.

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Inspired by the 2011 sci-fi film Real Steel starring Hugh Jackman, Greek teenager Dimitris Hatzis has become the youngest person in the world to build a 3D printed life-size functional robot. 

15-year-old Dimitris’s feat was a part of ‘InMoov’, an open source project run by French sculptor and designer Gael Langevin. The project provides a design that is “replicable on any home 3D printer with a 12x12x12cm area.” Using these instructions, Dimitris spent over 1,400 hours planning, experimenting, printing, and assembling the robot. Over the course of a year, he made 475 printed parts using about a kilometer of ABS plastic and painstakingly put them together to form the droid that he now calls ‘Troopy’.

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Drew Wissler, a.k.a Runnerguy2489, is the new superstar of the gaming world for his impressive feat of completing an entire video game (with all its levels and challenges) blindfolded. After 103 hours of sightless gameplay, he finally defeated the classic game The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time on October 14. Thousands of fans who watched the live stream were overcome with emotion after the monumental finish. Wissler himself reported that he “couldn’t stop shaking”.

Wissler, a speedrunning champion, was always obsessed with how quickly he could zip through video games. “I’m a runner in real life so I always compare it with that. How fast I can go,” the young civil engineer told The Daily Dot. It wasn’t until 2007, when he came across a blind player looking for help to complete Ocarina of Time that he got interested in blindfolded play. “It seemed a neat challenge and I thought I could help him out,” he said.

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Thanks to French builder Adrien Herve-Pellissier, the infamous ‘builder’s bum’ – a.k.a ‘plumber’s crack’ – could be a thing of the past. He’s invented a special variety of boxer shorts with an elastic band that adequately covers the offensive area. Given how common the eyesore of a problem is, it’s a wonder that no one’s ever thought of such a simple solution before!

“The underwear has a large elastic band on it, you see, so when you squat down we don’t have to see your a**e,” Adrien explained. He was inspired to design the underwear after witnessing the mortifying ‘crack’ first hand in Rennes. He then spent nine months recovering, and also coming up with a prototype of the underwear, which he’s named ‘le sourire de plombier’ (the smile of the plumber).

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