Summer is just around the corner and, as we all know, there’s no better way too cool off on a hot day than with a creamy ice cream. Apparently, the same goes for dogs, but feeding them regular ice-cream can cause serious health problems, so one ice-cream maker in Mexico City asked veterinarians for help creating frozen treats specifically for them.

Many dogs are lactose intolerant, so feeding them milk or products based on regular dairy can upset their stomachs and cause diarrhea. They also lack the enzymes needed to break down sugar, so eating too much of it can induce vomiting. Chocolate is also a big problem for canines, due to an alkaloid called theobromine, which they metabolize very slowly, and eating too much of it can literally kill them. After learning all this, Mauricio Montoya, owner of Don Paletto ice cream, in Mexico City, decided he needed to create a special kind of ice-cream for pooches.

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An ocean park in Wuhan, China, has come up with an original way to learn more about animals and makes a small profit in the process. For a fee of about $145, visitors can learn more about animals by cleaning their pens and preparing their feed.

The Wuhan Haichang Ocean Park recently made international headlines for a pretty bizarre service. In an effort to get people more interested in animals, it is allowing people to pay for the chance to get closer to them, scoop up their droppings, prepare their food and feed them. The offer is available only once a week, and applications and reservations have to be made a week in advance. It’s not free, though. People have to pay 998 yuan ($145) for the three-hour experience.

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Most people let the strands of hair that fall off when their shower just go down the drain, or they throw it in the trash, but Lucy Gafford, a multimedia artist from Alabama, uses it to create detailed works of art right on her bathroom wall.

The self-proclaimed “Shower Hair Master” discovered that her wet hair made a unique, albeit bizarre art medium, three years ago, while showering. She gathered the hair that came off of her head while washing it, and spread it on the bathroom wall, as she usually did. She planned to throw it away after she was done, but this time she noticed that the strands made up a recognizable shape, so she started playing around with the mass of hair and ended up creating a squirrel.

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Japanese artist Yoneji Inamura spent six years of his life collecting 20,000 beetles of different varieties and using them to create a five-foot sculpture of a popular Buddhist deity.

It’s unclear how and when exactly Inamura started catching and collecting beetles. Some sources claim that it was during his days working for the local railroad, in Itakura, Japan’s Gunma Prefecture, after noticing that the rhinoceros beetle’s horn resembled the fingers of the Buddhist deity, while others say that he was helping local children collect beetles and just became fascinated with them. Living in a rural area of Japan, Inamura was always surrounded by various types of beetles, including rhinoceros beetles, winged jewel beetles, drone beetles, longhorn beetles, just to name a few, and he dedicated most of his free time to catching and adding them to his collection.

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Sick of being taken for a ride by male car mechanics whenever she went to an auto repair shop, Patrice Banks became a certified mechanic herself. The ambitious woman is now educating other women on car maintenance and running an all-female car repair business in Philadelphia.

Born poor to a single mother, Patrice Banks has done very well for herself. She was the first in her family to graduate from high school and after engineering at Lehigh University, she went on to work as an engineer in a cellular analysis lab at DuPont for over a decade. It’s safe to say that she was a very ambitious and confident woman, but there was always one thing that made her feel insecure – having to take her car to a repair shop. The mechanics would either try to overcharge her, be condescending or make her wait simply because she was a woman.

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Sick of waiting for the local authorities to fix the streets and roads of their pothole-riddled city, a group of self-described anarchists decided to patch the pesky holes themselves, even if it means breaking the law.

The Portland Anarchist Road Care (PARC) was founded by a small circle of friends in response to the deteriorating road conditions in the Oregon city, which they believed made driving or cycling more costly and dangerous for citizens. They grew tired of waiting for the city to fix this pesky problem, and decided to do it themselves, using a well-known technique called cold patching. The anonymous anarchist have fixed potholes on three Portland blocks so far, but are constantly on the lookout for new crevices to fill.

“The roads in Portland were getting worse and worse, and like everyone else, we were just waiting for someone else to fix it,” a member of PARC told The Huffington Post. “We sort of reflected on the situation, and asked ourselves the questions made famous by John Lewis: ‘If not us, then who? If not now, then when?’ Two days later we were patching holes.”

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If you’ve ever poured wine out of a glass bottle, you’re already familiar with that annoying yet inevitable stream of spillage on the side of the bottle. It’s been a bane of wine aficionados for centuries, but no more, thanks to this drip-proof wine bottle created by a biophysicist.

Humanity has come a long way in the last two centuries. We’ve found cures to deadly diseases, sent people into outer space and connected the world through the internet, but we still had to put up with the frustration of pouring wine. There’s no way to avoid spilling that delicious liquid when pouring it out of a classic glass bottle. Sommeliers know this and wrap a napkin around the neck of the bottle when they pour. But that just wasn’t a good enough solution for Daniel Perlman, a wine lover and biophysicist at Brandeis University. So he set out to find a cheap and effective fix to this centuries-old problem.

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Bikini Beans Espresso is a coffee shop chain with branches in Arizona and Washington where patrons can have their favorite coffee prepared and served by beautiful women wearing bikinis, g-strings or just three strategically-placed stickers.

Thanks to its attractive dress code, Bikini Beans Espresso has become hugely popular, especially among its male clientele. Apparently, a simple visit to one of these coffee shops has a way of brightening up a man’s day, and it’s definitely not just the coffee. But despite encouraging sales, impressive 5-star ratings on Yelp and thousands of followers on social media, Bikini Beans Espresso has its fare share of critics, most of which claim that the mandatory dress code of the staff is degrading for women.

That’s definitely not how the owners of Bikini Beans Espresso shops see it, though. They claim that the girl’s skimpy “uniforms” actually empower women, helping them feel comfortable in their own skin.

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Want to brag about your active social life on Facebook, when you really have no friends? Trying to make your ex jealous by posing with an attractive new partner, but can’t find a date? No need to worry, this Japanese company will happily send you some fake friends or lovers for a fun photo shoot that will make your online friends green with envy. You’ll have to pay for it, though.

Keeping up appearances on social media is apparently very important to a lot of people, and Japanese company Family Romance is committed to helping its clients do just that. Whether they are looking to show co-workers that they are much more fun to be around than they appear to be at the office, or trying to impress a special someone with their active social life, the company’s Real Appeal service aims to help them succeed, by providing some fake friends for impressive photo shoots. Clients can then post these pics on their Facebook or Instagram pages to show everyone how fun their life is, without anyone knowing it’s all a paid-for illusion.

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Game2:Winter is an upcoming reality TV show where 30 participants will compete against themselves and the dangers of the Siberian wilderness – including brown bears and extreme temperatures – for a prize of $1.7 million. But the most shocking thing about this show is that, just like in the Hunger Games, “everything is allowed, fighting, alcohol, murder, rape, smoking, anything.”

News about this seemingly brutal reality show first broke out about a month ago, but reports were coming mostly from obscure news outlets and the whole idea seemed so extreme that I was pretty sure it was nothing more than a prank. Then I read that contestants had to survive until April 1st, 2018 – April Fools’ Day – and I was convinced it was fake. But the news never really went away, and now the Siberian Times newspaper announced that this Russian real-life version of the Hunger Games is actually happening, and it promises to be just as ruthless.

Ever since watching the hit TV series ‘Lost’, 35-year-old Yevgeny Pyatkovsky, a millionaire from Novosibirsk, Russia, had been wanting to create a reality show about surviving in the Siberian taiga, with little, to no help from the outside world. Now, thanks to technological advancements in surveillance equipment and online streaming, he is ready to make his idea a reality.

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Finding a place to park your car in Park Slope, Brooklyn on a daily basis is apparently an almost impossible task, which is why some people are willing to pay a whopping $300,000 for a simple parking space.

$300,000 is enough to buy an apartment in some parts of New York, but on Union Street, in Park Slope it will only buy you a parking space in a garage condominium. The last spot at 845 Union Street sold for $280,000, but the most recent one available is already $20,000 more expensive, and experts predict that prices will keep going up.

Howard Pronsky, the owner of the 300-space parking garage at 845 Union Street, said that three decades ago he bought the place for $29,000 per space, and while the price has steadily gone up since then, it only started growing exponentially when other garage owners in the area sold their properties to residential developers. Park Slope is running out of parking spaces, and people are willing to spend a fortune for peace of mind.

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In an effort to help people cope with the loss of their loved ones, a South Korean tech company is developing an app that lets them take photos and converse with digitally-rendered models of deceased friends and family.

Called “With Me”, the controversial app was developed by ELROIS, a Korean firm that specializes in creating realistic 3D avatars, and requires the featured person to sign up for an avatar while they are still alive. Currently, they have to visit a special booth where their bodies are scanned using special technology, but ELROIS hopes that smartphones will soon come with built-in 3D-scanning technology to streamline the process. The company then proceeds to create a “realistic” 3D avatar based on the scanned images, followed by reshaping and auto-rigging to make it animated.

Not only can users of the With Me app take selfies with these digital avatars of their loved ones, but thanks to artificial intelligence, they can also converse with them, or have them react to certain commands or information uploaded to the app. “When a user puts personal information in the app, the avatars remember the user from that time and recognize if there’s some changes in the of users as well,” an ELROIS spokesperson said. “For example, if there is a change in appearance or an emotional change and the avatar will mention something about it, such as ‘you look younger today, what is your secret?'”

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We all loved eating raw cookie dough when we were children, but apparently a lot of adults like it too. DO Cookie Dough Confections, a small shop in Greenwich Village, New York, sells roughly 1,500 pounds of safe-to-eat raw cookie dough every day to people willing to spend over an hour in line for a chance to relive their childhood fantasies.

28-year-old Kristen Tomlan, the founder and CEO of DO Cookie Dough Confections never outgrew her craving for raw cookie dough. She always wondered why there wasn’t a place where people could enjoy their favorite treat, and started contemplating the idea of opening up her own business on a vacation, when she and a few friends stopped at a cookie shop, but instead of buying baked treats, they opted for a tub of raw cookie dough, which they ate in the car.

In 2014, Tomlan almost died after an allergic reaction to an antibiotic left her in a medically induced coma for three weeks, just a couple of months before her wedding. This near-death experience made her realize that life is short and she should follow her dreams. She first started her raw-cookie dough business online, and after getting coverage on a couple of popular websites, she and her husband had to rearrange the furniture in their apartment to accommodate commercial freezers. She soon quit her job in branding to focus solely on her business.

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If you’ve ever been to Switzerland you already know that pretty much everything is expensive there, and the fresh mountain air is apparently no exception. Well, most of it is actually free, but if you want to order a liter of Swiss mountain air collected from a secret location in the Alps, you’ll have to cough up a whopping $167. This is not a joke!

John Green, a British expat living in Basel, Switzerland, is the brains behind “Genuine Mountain Air from Switzerland”, a fledgling online business that promises to ship fresh, high-quality Swiss air anywhere around the world, if you can afford it. Green claims to collect the air from a “secret location” near the town of Zermatt, then bottles it up in glass containers, labels it and ships it to buyers.

Described as “the ultimate present for the man or woman that has everything,” the bottled mountain air also comes with a certificate of authenticity and the exact GPS collection of the place it was collected from.

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While some women cover their faces with thick layers of foundation to cover up natural freckles, others are apparently getting them tattooed. Yup, freckles are in, and some people would even go under the needle to get them.

Freckle tattooing is reportedly one of the fastest growing beauty treatments available today. Similar to microblading, an eyebrow enhancing procedure, freckle tattooing involves the use of pigments to ink freckle-like dots onto a person’s face that eventually blend in with the client’s skin tone. As with any tattoo, there is some inevitable swelling, but it subsides after a few months, and the initial dark coloring of the freckles fades to a light brown.

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