What if your smartphones could send data about themselves to your iPhone? It sounds absurd, but Swiss sock manufacturer BlackSocks has been producing “Smarter Socks” that actually communicate with the owner’s smartphone ever since 2012. And yes, you can still buy them, but they’re definitely not cheap.

BlackSocks believes mankind is made for greater things than sorting socks, so in order to save their clients some valuable time, they came up with a high-tech way of helping them figure out which two socks go together. They might have overdone it a little bit, though, as this system involves Radio-frequency identification (RFID) chips on the socks, a handheld device that decodes the info on these chips, as well as a dedicated app for your smartphone. It sounds like a pretty complicated system for such a simple task as sorting out socks, but if you’re the kind of guy who likes to keep his socks paired, you’re going to love it.

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It is very dry in Kenya’s Tsavo East National Park, and the animals there are struggling to find vital water water sources. The bad news is that rain isn’t expected to fall again until November, but the good news is that there are people willing to bring water to the animals by the truckload until that happens.

Patrick Kilonzo Mwalua is the founder of Tsavo Volunteers, a group of animal lovers who look after the vulnerable wildlife of Tsavo National Park. Poachers are generally their biggest problem, but these days, the drought is threatening to kill even more animals . The prolonged drought has made water “a very precious commodity”, and thirsty animals sometimes have to walk long distances to find the few watering holes that haven’t dried up. Due to their scarcity, elephants often fight each other for the right to drink, which leaves the smaller, weaker ones at risk of dying. But Patrick and his team are not about to let that happen.

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A group of Chinese women recently made headlines after being photographed while lying in shallow graves on the outskirts of Chongqing City. It was revealed that they were taking part in a bizarre ritual called “graveyard meditation” which allegedly helps them cope with divorce.

Graveyard meditation is the brainchild of Liu Taijie, a 30-year-old divorcee who now helps other women get over romantic breakups. After getting married at the age of 19, and having a baby at 21, Liu went through a hard divorce in 2015, after also failing to launch her own business. It was a tough time, but she managed to pull through, and she now wants to help other women understand that life goes on and they have to put the past behind them, where it belongs.

“I know how a woman felt when she was feeling abandoned. I had the thought of committing suicide when I got divorced,” Ms. Liu said. When a person is desperate, he or she could almost feel they’re near death. By lying in the grave, my students could try to experience death. This will remind them that they have not done many things in their life and that they need to forget about the past and start a new life.” Read More »

UK-based company The Unseen has recently revealed a revolutionary hair dye that can change  between two colors whenever the temperature around the user fluctuates. This ingenious new product is called FIRE and despite being based on science, it looks like magic.

Within fashion circles, The Unseen founder Lauren Bowker is known as ‘The Alchemist’. It might sound like an exaggeration, but she and her team have indeed had some remarkable breakthroughs in design and fashion. The Unseen has patented color-changing technology that has allowed the company to create a variety of bespoke inks and coatings. These can in turn be used to create clothes and accessories that change color depending on certain factors, like temperature and humidity. But their latest creation, FIRE – a specially formulated hair dye that causes the hair to change color whenever the temperature fluctuates has been drawing the most attention.

A chemist, fashion designer and businesswoman, Lauren Bowker says that she came up with the idea for FIRE while watching a scene from the 90’s teen movie “The Craft”, more specifically a scene where Robin Tunney’s character goes from brunette to platinum blond by simply combing her fingers through her hair. “It was in that moment that the penny kind of dropped,” Lauren said. “I was like, ‘We could do that.'” And she did.

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He calls himself “Black Widow”, but his homemade spandex costume makes him look like a cross between Spiderman and Deadpool. He has been patrolling the streets of Norfolk, in Hampton Roads for the past two years, although not many people even know he exists. That may have something to do with the fact that he hasn’t done much crime busting so far.

Black Widow refuses to reveal his face and his real name, but goes by the alias Matsuda Yuuma, and claims to be 20 years old. He says he is a first Dan black belt, and has also tried karate and Muay-Thai, but he hasn’t had the chance to test out his fighting skills in a clash with wrong-doers. In fact, he spends most of his days helping out the homeless, performing first aid in case of accidents, and the little crime fighting that he does mainly resumes to preventing car break-ins and de-escalating potentially violent situations. Still, he always carries a trusty can of pepper spray and a retractable police baton, in case things get hairy.

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Do companies need a strong leader to make it in today’s highly competitive environment? Many would say “yes, definitely”, but the employees of one Swedish software consultancy company would tell them otherwise. They don’t have a CEO. Nobody tells anyone what to do, instead all the 40 employees have meetings and decide together.

Crisp, the software consultancy firm that has become world famous for not having a boss, has in fact gone through a number of organisational structures, including the classic formula of having a single person running things. Hoping to get its employees more involved, it moved on to changing its chief executive officer annually, but ultimately, the 40-strong staff decided there was actually no need for a single leader, so they scrapped the position altogether.

“We said, ‘what if we had nobody as our next CEO – what would that look like?’ And then we went through an exercise and listed down the things that the CEO does,” said Yassal Sundman, a developer at Crisp. He and his colleagues quickly realized that many of the CEO’s responsibilities overlapped with their own, with the few roles that didn’t easily shareable among other employees. SO they decided to give the boss-less experiment a try.

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For years, companies have been researching ways to best package potato chips to prevent them from being crushed, but one company is actually crushing them on purpose so that you can just toss them in your moth directly from the bag, without touching them with your hands.

I’m not yet sure if Fail Chips are an actual product or just a promotional stunt, but the concept behind them is actually pretty cool. Most potato chip fans will tell you that the best part of a bag are the crushed chip bits at the bottom. They’re super salty, super seasoned, and best of all, you can toss them in your mouth straight out of the bag, without having to lay a finger on them. Well, somebody decided to make the best part of the bag the whole bag. They take full-size chips, crush them into small pieces, package them in colorful bags and sell them as tasty snacks.

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Zhao Yongjiu, a 56-year-old street cleaner from Shenyang, China, recently won the internet after it was revealed that over the last three decades he has helped fund the education of 37 impoverished children by donating most of his monthly salary.

Every day, the kindhearted sanitation worker leaves his home in Shenyang, China’s Liaoning Province, at 4:30 in the morning and returns at 9 p.m.. He earns a monthly salary of 2,400 yuan ($350), barely enough to make a decent living, but he somehow manages to live on way less, donating the rest to poor kids, so they can afford to go to school and get a proper education. He has been doing this for the last three decades and doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon. Zhao estimates that during that time he has donated around 170,000 yuan ($24,750), and put 37 disadvantaged kids through school.

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Open relationships are not that uncommon nowadays, but they usually imply that both partners are allowed to see other people. That’s not the case of Adam Gillet and Beatrice Gibbs, from Milton Keynes, Britain. 27-year-old Adam has agreed to let his 22-year-old girlfriend sleep with other men, for fear that he would otherwise lose her. However, Beatrice is not ok with him seeing other women.

Adam, a warehouse worker, and Beatrice, who works as a makeup artist, met in 2014, on a pub crawl. They had a one night stand, but didn’t officially become a couple until April 2015. However, their romantic relationship appeared to be short-lived,as Beatrice, who wasn’t ready to commit to just one man full-time, decided to end it after just one month. Adam was devastated, but upon hearing that she loved him, but didn’t think she could resist other men, he did what any other men in his shoes would have done – he agreed to let Beatrice have her one nigh-stands, as long as she gave their relationship another chance. They’ve been together ever since.

Beatrice is free to sleep with whoever she wants, whenever she wants, as long as she’s honest with Adam about it. He doesn’t have the same privileges, though, as his girlfriend claims that she couldn’t handle the thought of him being with another woman. Luckily, she apparently has nothing to worry about, as Adam insists he’s not interested in chasing other women.

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The life of one garden snail may not mean very much in the grand scheme of things, but for one Israeli woman who accidentally stepped on one, cracking its brittle shell, it was enough to warrant a visit to the local vet clinic.

It’s quite in rainy in Tel Aviv this time of year, and moisture-loving garden snails are very active. They sometimes venture outside their natural habitat, and, unfortunately, some of them get stepped on by careless humans. Most of the time the snail get squashed, but, in the most fortunate cases, only their shells get damaged. If they don’t suffer major injuries to their bodies, snails will usually fix their mobile homes by drawing in calcium, but one lady in the Israeli capital didn’t want to leave anything to chance after accidentally stepping on a slow-crawling snail.

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Labs To Go, a paternity testing laboratory in Virginia Beach, has come under fire for its use of a couple of controversial billboards that they claim were just intended to be funny. People didn’t see them that way, though, and it’s easy to see why.

The billboard that got the most attention in the media is located off Armistead Ave. near Downtown Hampton, and shows a male U.S. soldier standing next to a smiling postman, with the catchphrase “Who’s the Daddy” taking up most of the advertising space. While the fact that they chose an African-American man as the postman and a Caucasian soldier makes the joke extremely obvious, that didn’t prevent folks from expressing their disapproval of the advert.

The second Labs To Go Billboard is on display in Norfolk, and shows a blonde woman with a Pinocchio-like nose next to the catchphrase “Is the Mother a Liar?” and phone number of the paternity testing lab. This one didn’t sit too well with the local community either.

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Designed to help frequent flyers bypass airport baggage queues, reduce baggage fees and virtually eliminate the risk of lost luggage, this modular Airport Jacket features 14 pockets and two detachable “pocket panels” that fit around 15 kilograms of luggage.

“With airlines beginning to charge for overhead carry-on baggage as well as severely restricting baggage allowances for the low fare economy traveler, my partner and I have designed a modular jacket that allows you to wear your laptop, tablet, two pairs of shoes, a pair of jeans, five t-shirts, a jumper and an SLR camera,” designer Claire Murphy explains. “It totals 14 deep pockets, including eight pockets at hip length, 11 pockets at three-quarter length and 14 pockets at full length. It includes two detachable pocket panels, and a carry-on size duffle bag.”

Claire and Benke Murphy came up with the idea for the Airport Jacket while traveling home with their newborn child. They had so much extra carry-on luggage, because of the baby, that the airline tried to charge them $140 for it, more than the cost of their tickets. So they had to clothes, gadget chargers, diapers and toys into their pockets, until they were just over the weight limit. They dodged the tax, but everything was sticking out of their pockets and it was a pretty uncomfortable plane ride. That’s when they decided that there was a massive need for a solution to this problem, and the idea for the Airport Jacket was born.

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From jellyfish to miso ramen, Japan has some of the most bizarre ice cream flavors in the world, but a frozen treat that’s supposed to replicate the texture and smell of soft cat and dog paws is a bit too much, even for the Land of the Rising Sun.

Japan’s longstanding fascination with cat paws is not exactly new. To many Japanese feline lovers, cat paws smell like nice things (right from caramel crepes, to wheat and sunflowers) and their soft, smooth texture is considered mysteriously soothing. Cat paws are so popular that a couple of years ago, a company came out with a hand-cream that not only left the users’ hands as smooth to the touch as a cat’s paw, but also made their skin smell like it too. But now, the organizers of the 2017 Japan Pet Fair, are taking this obsession one step further with two unique ice creams designed to have the texture and flavor of cat and dog paws.

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It’s hard to imagine why anyone would voluntarily infect themselves with one of the deadliest viruses in human existence, but for “Los Frikis” – a Cuban punk community living under the regime of Fidel Castro during the 80s and 90s – injecting themselves with HIV-infected syringes was the easiest way to escape persecution and police harassment.

Los Frikis, the name than became synonymous with punks, metalheads and pretty much anyone who didn’t fit in with mainstream Cuban society, came together during the late 1980’s. Their music, dressing style and culture were influenced by that of similar communities in the United States and other European countries, something that didn’t sit well with Fidel Castro’s communist regime. Most of the bands also sang in English, which only made things worse for Frikis in general. Although the language was purely an aesthetic choice, speaking English in those days was considered a huge no-no.

Breaking social norms was a risky affair in 1980s Cuba, and the Frikis paid a high price for it. Many of them were rejected by their families, harassed, arrested and forced to do manual labor for their “crimes”. Los Frikis would meet in safehouses located in run-down areas, but other than that they didn’t have many places where they felt accepted. Tired of the constant persecution, many of them  took up a form of protest that can only be described as extreme – infecting themselves with HIV by injecting the blood of their sick friends into their veins.

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The authors of a Class IV textbook in India recently came under fire, after it was revealed that in a lesson on the importance of breathing they were literally encouraging the kids to do an experiment involving suffocating a cat.

It sounds hard to believe that a school textbook for environmental studies could teach children as young as 9 years old to kill an animal as an experiment, but it’s sadly true. Twitter user Lola Kuttiamma shared photos of the book passages concerning the absurd experiment, and people understandably were outraged about it. “Living things breathe”, the textbook explains. “No living thing can live without air for more than a few minutes. “You can do an experiment. Take two wooden boxes. Make holes on lid of one box. Put a small kitten in each box. Close the Boxes. After some time open the boxes. What do you see? The kitten in the box with no holes has died.”

Wow, is that educational or what? And they’re not even suggesting using adult cats, but cute little kittens. Not that grown cats would have made it any more acceptable, but kittens just make it sound even crueler. And if you thought things couldn’t possibly get worse, you were wrong. The textbook, entitled “Our Green World: Environment Studies”, also features a couple of pictograms, with one kitten alive and well in the box with holes in it, and the other, well, dead.

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