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.
By Spooky on September 30th, 2016 Category: Travel
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.
Lucid Dreamer is an ingenious device programmed to detect REM sleep, the time when people dream more vividly, and emit low electrical impulses to help you realize that you are dreaming, allowing you to take control of your dreams and go on lucid adventures.
Lucid dreams are dreams in which you realize that you are dreaming, but while 20% of the population experience lucid dreams every month, these are usually happen accidentally. However, recent research has shown that a specific brain activity, known as “gamma activity” is associated with lucid dreaming, and that gama activity can be enhanced with the use of Transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS), a form of mild electrical stimulation of the brain. During a study in which tACS was used to enhance gamma activity during REM sleep, lucidity was achieved in 77% of dreams.
Khoudia Diop is a young Senegalese fashion model who recently rose to internet stardom after her unusually dark skin tone was captured in a photo for the Colored campaign, a platform that celebrates different skin shades.
Khoudia’s melanin-rich skin has taken the internet by storm, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, especially on Instagram, where she regularly posts photos of herself using the handle @melaniin.goddess. People seem crazy about her stunning natural beauty and unique skin tone, showering her with compliments about her look and declaring themselves impressed by her positive attitude and confidence.
69-year-old Santiago Sanchez, from western El Salvador, has been spending his days digging away at a tunnel ever since God told him to do it, 18 years ago. A reporter recently entered the tunnel, but had to exit before reaching the end, due to respiratory problems, so no one really knows how long it really is.
Every morning, at around 3 a.m., Santiago Sanchez goes down a hole into the tunnel he has been digging for nearly two decades and spends the whole day carving away at the rough service. When the day is done, he exits with around 90 pounds of rock and debris. He has sworn to dedicate every waking hour of his life to the bizarre project and fulfill God’s command. The pensioner says that he received a message from the Lord, 18 years ago, telling him to start digging a hole. He took it to heart and hasn’t stopped since.
By Spooky on September 29th, 2016 Category: Animals
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.
Cafe 51, a popular burger joint in Melbourne, Australia, is offering anyone the chance to receive a free burger per day, for the rest of their lives, if they get a scale tattoo of one of their delicious burgers, anywhere on their bodies.
“Tattoos are for life, so why shouldn’t burgers be free for life too, right?” the #freeburgersforlife campaign page on the Cafe 51 website states. “It’s simple, pick a burger, any burger from our current menu and get it tattooed anywhere on your body. You are then forever part of our #burgerfamily and you qualify to get this burger absolutely free everyday for the rest of your life. Coz we reckon that since you love us enough to join our #burgerfamily by getting a tattoo of one of our burgers, we love you enough to give you a free burger every day for the rest of your life!”
The controversial promotional stunt had been teased for about a month and finally launched on Sunday night. By Monday, over 450 people had registered, and at the time of this writing, over 3,000 Cafe 51 are waiting to get their favorite burger tattooed. Considering all the media attention the campaign is getting and the fact that Cafe 51 plans to take registrations all through October, the number of applicants will probably reach into the tens of thousands.
By Spooky on September 28th, 2016 Category: Travel
If you ever feel like connecting with your inner child while sipping on your favorite alcoholic drink, the Ball Pool Bar Dive in Osaka, Japan, is probably the best place to do it.
Kids love ball pits, and the masterminds behind Ball Pool Bar Dive seem to think adults do too, so they got rid of the usual bar furniture and instead turned the place into a giant ball pit filled with over 20,000 colorful plastic balls. But there’s nothing remotely childish about the drinks menu, as you can order pretty much any alcoholic drink served at a regular bar, only instead of drinking yourself unconscious at a table, you get to do it buried up to your neck in balls, while other intoxicated patrons dive in all around you. What’s not to like?
Until recently, having an alcohol-free night at the local bar left you with only a few bland options – water, a sweetened soft drink or a non-alcoholic cocktail. But that was before someone had the brilliant idea to create Seedlip, the world’s first alcohol-free spirit.
Ben Branson, the mastermind behind Seedlip, claims he came up with the formula for his unique spirit while reading John French’s 1651 book, “The Art of Distillation.” In it he found a large number of remedies for various ailments, and while some included alcohol, a lot of them didn’t. “It’s easy to forget that alcohol had its origins in medicine. That quickly moved to drinking for pleasure, and it seems we forgot about the non-alcoholic side,” Seedlip Ben (the name he usually goes by) says. “I’m not a distiller and I’m not scientific, but I thought that was interesting. So I bought a little still and starting playing around in my kitchen.”
Using various herbs he was growing in his backyard, a copper still, water and steam, Ben started experimenting, and eventually realized he could make a liquid that smelled and tasted like whatever plant he put in the still. He calls it his “eureka” moment because it got him wondering if he could make a drink like this and, if anyone else had done it before. It turns out they hadn’t, at least not commercially, so he ended up marketing his final formula for Seedlip as the world’s first non-alcoholic spirit.
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.
By Spooky on September 27th, 2016 Category: Travel
Modern life has its perks, but if you feel like taking a break from it all and going back in time for a few days, there’s a unique tourist facility in Sweden that offers you the opportunity to live in a wooden charcoal-burner hut located in the middle of a forest, cook your own food over an open fire, chop wood and clean your dishes in a nearby spring.
The Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge Hotel is not for everyone. If you can’t even fathom the idea of living without electricity, running water, or a modern toilet, then the rustic charm of this place will probably not appeal to you. But for anyone trying to escape the pressure and busy life of the big city or take a break from the internet and other modern gadgets, this place is paradise. Located 1 km south of Skärsjön Beach, in the middle of a pristine Swedish forest, Kolarbyn Eco-Lodge consists of 12 charcoal-burner huts with nothing but two sheepskin-covered wooden beds, and a wood stove that uses wood chopped by the guests themselves.
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?”
You should never judge a pepper by its size, especially when it comes to price. The Aji Charapita chili pepper grows is roughly the size of a pea, but there’s nothing small about its price. A kilogram of this stuff will set you back a whopping $35,000.
Native to the jungles of norther Peru, the Aji Charapita is known as a wild pepper, and has only recently recently being cultivated for commercial use. Used fresh, this tiny pepper is said to have a strong fruity flavor that gives salsas and sauces a tropical taste, but it is mostly used in powdered form to a bit of spiciness to various dishes. Although still fairly unknown in most Western countries, the Aji Charapita is a highly sought-after treat among chili pepper connoisseurs and five-star restaurant chefs.
Using extract from the hottest chilli pepper on the planet, American company Paqui Chips has created the world’s spiciest tortilla chip – the Carolina Reaper Madness. It’s apparently so hot that it only comes in packs of one.
Usually, when you open a bag of tortilla chips, you never stop at one, but when it comes to Carolina Reaper Madness chips, Jeff Day, Brand Manager for Paqui Chips, says that one is all you need. “It’s the hottest chip you’ll ever have, I can guarantee you that. After you eat that one chip, trust me, you’re not looking to dig back into the bag and have a second one. So, one chip is what we created to have the experience,” he says.
Students at the Sichuan Normal University in Chengdu, south-west China, are apparently studying harder and sitting in on extra classes just to see their ‘impossibly beautiful’ female educators.
Photos of 16 attractive female teachers from Sichuan Normal University have become a hot topic on Chinese social media websites, after they were uploaded online by their school. The good-looking teachers, who specialize in a variety of majors, including singing, dancing, artistic design, theater and English, were apparently selected to pose for the photos in a bid to change Chinese people’s views on successful female teachers, who are often perceived as old, ruthless and cold. The campaign was a big hit, and after the success of the first batch of photos posted in May, the university published a second series of photos on September 19.
