A small town in Spain has come up with a new way of dealing with dog waste – a canine public toilet. Located along a busy thoroughfare in El Vendrell, northeastern Spain, the stainless steel contraption consists of two sections placed side by side – a doggy potty and a doggy urinal.

The potty is a raised steel platform with a covered hole. Dog owners need to lift the lid for their pets to defecate, and later press a handle to flush. Jets of water are released, which carry the excrement through underground pipes into the sewer system. Right next to the potty is the urinal – also a raised platform with small holes over which dogs can squat. The public toilet is the brainchild of dog-lover Enric Girona, who has spent over ten years observing and photographing dogs. Through his work, he recognized the need for a toilet for dogs, so he set about creating one himself. “Over the years, I’ve seen that if you train and raise dogs well, these animals can be just like humans,” he explained.

Girona invented several variants of the toilet, modifying each one as he learned more and more about dog behavior. The present version of the urinal, for example, doesn’t clean itself perfectly when flushing, because need to pick the odor so they are lured to the toilet. He also had the location in mind while designing these toilets, so they’d naturally blend into surroundings like parks and other public places. “You can’t have something that clashes with the setting,” he pointed out. “The design was done with the concept of being attractive.”

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What do you get when you combine Table Tennis and Football, and throw in a dash of technology? The answer is Teqball, an addictive new sport that’s becoming more popular every day. The sport involves the bouncing of a ball between opponents, off a highly sophisticated table designed to keep things fair.

To play a game of Teqball, all you need are a Teqboard and a ball. According to the official website, the Teqboard is a sporting equipment, very similar to a ping-pong table, that’s been designed keeping in mind the rules of mathematics and physics. So a ball will bounce off any point on the board, making it easy to reach and control. Although you can’t touch the board, it can withstand a great amount of pressure, making it durable and safe to use.

The ‘net’ at the center of the board is made of polycarbonate/plexiglass, ensuring that the ball bounces off it in a fair manner. Thanks to the unique design of the Teqboard, the only thing that matters in the game is talent; there’s no room for luck. The ball used for playing is a regular football, preferably a FIFA size 4.

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If you thought suitcases with wheels were handy, wait till you check out this new invention. It’s an electric suitcase that not only has wheels, but is also equipped with a small motor – so instead of carrying or dragging it, and you actually get to ride it wherever you need to go. Getting by in an airport will seem a breeze with this bad boy. You just sit on it, start it up, and go!

The 15-pound, battery-operated, drivable suitcase is the brainchild of Chinese amateur inventor He Liangcai. On a full charge, the suitcase can transport two adults at 12 mph for a distance of up to 37 miles. It also has GPS navigation and a burglar alarm.

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If you’ve always struggled to express your emotions, then you should seriously consider getting the Mood Sweater to do it for you. Sensoree, a San Francisco-based company, has created a new line of high-tech sweaters that display the wearer’s moods.

Along with the sweater, you need to wear a sensor on your hand. Information about your emotions are transmitted to the collar, embedded with LED lights that glow in a variety of colors. The wide turtleneck is white when unused, but glows in various colors, according to the wearer’s mood, when worn.

The emotive display is color coded: green for tranquil, Zen; blue for calm, relaxed; purple for ruffled, aroused or excited; red for nervous, in love; yellow for nirvana, ecstatic, blissful. The technology in the sweater is similar to that used in some lie detectors – it gathers information from the wearer’s sweat glands.

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20-year-old Raul Oaida, a self-taught technology genius, has built the world’s first life-size LEGO car using 500,000 pieces. It’s not just a model, you can actually drive it. And the fuel costs nothing, because the car runs on air!

Oaida’s partner in this project was Australian entrepreneur, Steve Sammartino. The car was built in Romania, Oaida’s home country, and delivered to Melbourne, Australia for a test drive. Together, they named it the ‘Super Awesome Micro Project’ (I think the name is perfect!).

The engine of the car is also entirely made of LEGO. It has “four orbital engines and a total of 256 pistons.” According to the project website, the top speed isn’t very impressive, around 20 to 30 km. “We were scared of a Lego explosion so we drove it slowly,” the founders wrote. Steve and Oaida say that the project was possible only because of the internet. The two even met online, when Steve accepted Oaida’s Skype request. “I’m teaching him about business and he’s teaching me a bit about physics,” Steve told the press.

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The Silic shirt is an amazing garment that just doesn’t catch a stain. No matter what you spill on it – water, soda, or even ketchup – it just rolls right off the T-shirt. Invented by San Francisco based student, Aamir Patel, the shirts are made from a material with billions of silica particles bonded to the fibers on a microscopic level.

Despite the unique material used, Silic shirts are said to feel no different from regular clothing. Patel has created a Kickstarter page for his unique invention and has already exceeded his target of raising $20,000. The campaign closes on 26^th January. The shirts are expected to go on sale online in May, at $50 apiece.

Patel has been working on the shirt project for a year-and-a-half now. For his first prototype, he simply sprayed a stain-resistant chemical on a shirt, but he realized it would last for only one wash. Then he started to think of a way to incorporate the technology right into the fabric. After several trials and errors, he finally managed to create a fabric that is stain-proof on a molecular level. Not only does the technology last longer,but  it doesn’t even irritate the skin, either. Patel says that most liquid molecules will not be able to touch the fabric because of a microscopic layer of air that forms between the liquid and fabric.

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Sprayable Energy is a patent-pending invention that allows people to get all the energy benefits of caffeine without the dreaded coffee aftertaste. The spray is absorbed through the skin and distributed through the body over a period of several hours, giving the user a long-lasting caffeine buzz.

21-year-old Ben Yu and his partner Deven Soni have recently launched a campaign on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo for an innovative product called Sprayable Energy. The small plastic can contains an unscented, colorless formula that gives users that much needed boost of energy without the jitters and sudden caffeine crash. “Coffee didn’t work for me,” Yu told Inc.com. “When I ingest it, it’s like roller coaster ride of energy.” He decided to work on an alternative to the popular beverage in October 2012, while trying to get a degree in biochemistry. He started researching how nicotine patches worked, and like any young inventor, used himself as a test-subject for his experiments. His father, who holds a PhD in chemistry, also helped out, and after a lot of hard work, Ben came up with a special formula containing water, a derivative of the amino acid tyrosine, and caffeine that could be sprayed on the skin and offer the same energy buzz of coffee without the nasty taste and side-effects. Now all they needed was an extra $15,000 to develop the product line.

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“It is as MAD as it looks,” British garage inventor Colin Furze says about his crazy jet-powered bicycle, Norah. Strapping a home-made jet engine to an old bike, the nutty Brit has created what may very well be the most dangerous bicycle ever.

Looking at all the outrageous things he has created over the years, one might be tempted to think he’s an engineer with a passion for insane inventions. But he’s only a plumber who likes to create wacky-yet-fascinating things in his home workshop. He is known for building the world’s longest motorbike, the fastest mobility scooter, and a gas-powered stroller, using only “tools that proper engineers would laugh at”. But he is proof that “you don’t need an expensive lathe and huge welder to create something amazing.” His latest achievement is Norah, a jet-powered bicycle able to reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. As you can probably imagine it’s terribly unsafe, yet incredibly fun to ride. Norah is literally one hot vehicle, as the DIY engine’s exhausts get so hot they actually turn bright red at full throttle. Instead of using a heat shield and ruining the bike’s look, he oped to make it longer and put some distance between the rider’s bum and the engine. But extreme heat isn’t the only thing you should be worried about when riding Norah.

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Two Indonesian high school student have impressed judges at the national Science Project Olympiad with their ingenious air freshener made from from cow dung. Believe it or not, the organic product actually has a pleasant plant-like fragrance.

Dwi Nailul Izzah and Rintya Aprianti Miki managed to surpass 1,000 other participants at the Indonesian Science Project Olympiad (ISPO), held at the end of February, in Jakarta, and won gold medals for their original invention – an environmentally-friendly air-freshener made from cow manure. I know, that’s probably one of the last ingredients you’d expect to find in such a product, but according to the judges and everyone else who had the chance to sniff the girls’ air freshener, it has a surprisingly nice herbal fragrance. But it wasn’t just the smell that won Dwi and Rintya points. Their natural air freshener contains none of the chemicals found in similar commercially-available products, and it’s also more affordable. While a conventional 275-gram air freshener costs 39,000 Indonesian rupiah ($4), a 225-gram can of cow dung air freshener costs just $21,000 rupiah ($2). The two young inventors are getting ready to showcase their unique invention at the International Environment Project Olympiad (INEPO), in Istanbul, and are getting ready to file for a patent.

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Tired of waking up very late and missing his university lectures, Indian student Sankalp Sinha decided to do something about his problem – he invented a special alarm clock that “rewards” the owner with an electric shock if he tries to press the snooze button.

19-year-old Sankalp Sinha came up with the idea for his shocking alarm clock a couple of years ago, when he was having trouble getting up in the morning to attend university classes. He had developed a habit of hitting the snooze button and going back to sleep, so he started thinking about a solution that would force him out of bed. A student of automobile engineering at Sharda University in Uttar Pradesh, India, Sinha came up with an idea for an alarm clock that administers a small electric shock via the very popular snooze button. “The shock it administers is harmless but is enough to energize you”, the young inventor says, adding that users will be able to adjust how strong the electric shock they get is. He added that the power of his Good Morning Sing N Shock clock will be a fraction of the 50,000 volts delivered by the standard Taser gun. Pretty weak, but you want the thing to wake you up, not put you to sleep, right?

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Created by MIT student Melissa Chow, the “like-a-hug” jacket makes virtual experiences a bit more realistic, by inflating and giving you a hug whenever someone likes you on Facebook. Soon, real friends will probably be obsolete.

Having people like you on Facebook is nice, but don’t you wish you could feel the love whenever they hit that “Like” button? Well, thanks to the innovative “like-a-hug” jacket, now you can. Inventor Melissa Chow, from the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says it “allows us to feel the warmth, encouragement, support, or love that we feel when we receive hugs”. The concept behind this Facebook jacket is fairly simple – air pockets inside the jacket inflate every time your smartphone sends a signal that a new “like”has been received. Better still, you can send hugs back to your friend by simply squeezing the jacket and deflating it.

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Are horror films not scary enough for you? Than you might want to try watching them from the Chilly Chair, an offbeat invention that literally raises the hair on your forearms and back to enhance emotion.

You could say Shogo Fukushima’s invention is really hair-raising. The doctoral student who attends the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo wanted to create a device that would induce body hair to stand up, thus potentially intensifying people’s reaction to movies and video games. He came-up with a thing called the Chilly Chair, with weird forearm-rests that use electricity to reproduce the sensation usually activated by feelings of fear and surprise. The square arches of the innovative chair are made up of three layers; from the inside to the outside it contains an insulating dielectric plate, an electrode and a rubber plate. Electricity goes through the electrode polarizing the dielectric plate and attracts the user’s arm hairs making them experience a sensation similar to when picking up clothes charged with static energy. After testing the Chilly Chair on six subjects, Fukushima found they showed stronger reactions to video and audio stimuli.

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You know those movies where an author with writer’s block keeps throwing drafts over his shoulder trying to hit the trash can, but never seems to land one in? Well, that might just be a problem of the past, because someone seems to have invented a smart trash can that targets and catches flying pieces of trash.

It’s amazing what some people can create if they put their minds to it. Take this Japanese guy who goes by “FRP”, who, inspired by a commercial, decided to create his own trash can of the future, able to anticipate where flying trash is going to land and catch it before it hits the ground. It sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie, but according to the clever inventor, all you need is a wheeled base integrated with a circuit board and attached to the bottom of a common trashcan, a Kinect camera to monitor the room, and a specially-written program that allows the camera to track incoming garbage and guide the trashcan to catch it before it lands.

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Hiccups, we all get them from time to time, and the most annoying thing about them is they are so darn hard to get rid of. But 13-year-old Mallory Kievman seems to have finally found a cure to this irritating problem – a hiccup-stopping lollipop called the Hiccupop.

Mallory’s quest to find a real cure for hiccups started during the summer of 2010. She had tried to cure her uncontrollable hiccups by swallowing saltwater, making herself gag, eating a spoonful of sugar, drinking a glass of water upside-down or sipping pickle juice. None of those seemed to work on their own, but the ambitious young girl was determined to find a real cure for the annoying problem man has been facing since the beginning of time. Fast forward two years and almost 100 folk remedies tried, Mallory Kievman has reached her goal and is starting a company to commercialize and promote her magic product – Hiccupops.

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Ever came across someone so annoyingly chatty that you wanted to shoot them with an invisible gun and shut them up? Well, you might just be able to, thanks to the Speech Jammer. It’s a Japanese invention that could very well be the perfect answer to all the talkative people out there. The device is said to be powerful enough to jam a person’s speech from up to 98ft away.

Sounds too good to be true, right? The inventors, Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada, explain how it works. The prototype invention supposedly records the obnoxious speech with a directional microphone, adds a 0.2 second delay, and then fires it right back at the prattler with the help of a directional speaker. So there’s basically a delay between when the person says something and when they hear their own speech. This would mess with the person so bad, that they would soon be rendered speechless for a while. Perfect! But then, the device itself looks so huge and scary in its current avatar, I think people might shut up the very moment it was pointed at them.

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