Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have an espresso machine for beer and bypass the whole fermentation process? It sounds like simple wishful thinking, but it turns out such a thing actually exists, and has for some time now.

SodaStream has been selling home carbonation machines that let you turn tap water into soda for over two and a half decades, and now it looks all set to enter the beer market, as well. The company has apparently come up with an instant beer concentrate that works with their soda machines, allowing anyone to turn water into beer at the press of a button.

The new Beer Bar kit turns SodaStream machines into microbreweries, enabling you to create crafted beer in seconds by simply adding a unique “Blondie” concentrate. The resulting brew has 4.5% alcohol content and allegedly has a “smooth authentic taste and a hop-filled aroma.” According to a company statement, one liter of Blondie yields three liters of cold brewski.

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Dan Futrell and Isaac Stoner, two average guys from Boston, recently set out on an expedition to find the black box of Eastern Flight 980, which crashed into the Andes Mountains killing everyone on board, 31 years ago. Believe it or not, they actually did it!

A year ago, while researching the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, Dan Futrell discovered a fact he found very intriguing – since 1965, crash investigators have failed to recover flight data and cockpit voice recorders from almost 20 flights, including the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001. But it was another flight that really caught his attention – Eastern Air Lines Flight 980, which took off from Paraguay for Miami, on January 1, 1985. It crashed into the side of Illimani Mountain and its black box was never recovered. Crash investigators have long suspected that the recording device had landed in an area that was nearly inaccessible, but this was something Futrell simply could not accept. “How is it that there is a place on this Earth that we can’t reach?” the young man wrote on his blog.

He and his friend Isaac Stoner spent the following year planning an expedition to the Andes Mountains, in Bolivia, with the sole purpose of searching for the missing black box of Eastern Air Lines Flight 980. “Dan and I are both remarkably average dudes: average height, average weight, average athletic ability, average lookin’…I would venture to say neither of us is beyond 2 standard deviations from average intelligence either. And yet here we are, about to try to do something pretty non-average,” Isaac wrote on their blog before flying off to Bolivia. “This is not exactly the trip that most people would book for their summer vacation. If we fail in finding the black box, I hope that this trip will at least inspire some other average folks to get off the couch and do something un-ordinary (if not extraordinary) themselves.”

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In an attempt to increase respect for grave digging and attract more people to the job, three dozens of the best gravediggers in Hungary competed in a unique grave digging competition, last Friday.

The bizarre competition took place at a graveyard in the city of Debrecen. 18 two-man teams were assigned their plots arbitrarily by pulling numbers out of a hat, and supplied with regulation-size shovels, rakes, axes and pickaxes to use in digging the best grave in the shortest amount of time. Contestants were judged on speed, grave neatness and whether they complied with the regulation size: 200 cm long, 80 cm wide and 160 cm deep (7 feet by 2 feet 7 inches by 5 feet). Enjoying the home advantage, the local team came out victorious, digging their grave in less than half an hour. That’s pretty impressive considering some of the other teams took almost an hour to complete theirs.

Each team had their own technique. Some preferred to dig simultaneously and clean up after the hole was finished, while others had one man digging and the other arranging the dirt into neat piles around the grave site. They all agreed that the conditions were just right on the big day, with the earth being “quite soft and humid.”

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Seen from a far, Savjibhai Rathwa looks like he is carrying a long black rope wrapped around his right arm, but that is actually a thick dreadlock made from his still-growing 19-meter-long hair.

The 60-year-old man from Vadorara, India’s Gujarat state, has been growing his hair for decades, always treating it with great care. He spends three hours washing it every two days and dries it by walking around his farm and having his grandchildren spread out his locks while he smokes his water pipe in the shade of a tree.

To keep his hair strong and healthy, Rathwa relies on a vegetarian home-cooked diet and tries to avoid spicy food as much as possible. “When out on work, I survive on fruits only. I never ever take outside food,” Savjibhai Rathwa said. If he gets hungry, he simply eats a banana.

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When he’s not too busy fighting crime and battling super-villains in New York, Spiderman teaches computer science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Ciudad de Mexico.

It all started in 2002, when the blockbuster movie Spider-Man, featuring Tobey Maguire, started screening in Mexico. 12-year-old Moises Vazquez Reyes instantly fell in love with the Marvel superhero and even started working on his own Spiderman outfit, after failing to find one that fit his high standards. He used online tutorials as inspiration, but it wasn’t an easy job for a young boy. Moises finally finished his dream Spiderman costume in 2014, the same year he started reading more comics about his favorite character. One day he stumbled upon the Amazing Spider – Man # 661 in which the popular superhero offers to be a substitute teacher at the Avengers Academy. He thought to himself “not a bad idea, wouldn’t it be great if Spiderman gave classes in computer science?” 

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Vergenoegd Wine Estate, a small vineyard in South Africa, keeps the use of chemicals to a minimum with the help of a 900-strong army of ducks that make sure all the vines are always free of pests and snails.

One of the last things you would expect to see on a vineyard is a large group of ducks running around, quacking and looking or things to feast on. And yet that’s the sight you’re very likely to behold at Vergenoegd Wine Estate, in Stellenbosch, South Africa. A feathery army of 900 Indian Runner Ducks is unleashed through the grape vines two times a day – once at 9.45am and again at 3.30pm – and allowed to feast on any pests and snails they can find. Over the years, the ducks have become a tourist attraction of sorts and even have their own daily parade where visitors can watch them run to work. As you can see in the video below, it’s a pretty impressive sight.

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How much is privacy worth to you? If the answer is “a lot” and you have tens of thousands of dollars to burn, you might want to check out the new Solarin Android smartphone, a $16,500 handheld that its makers claim is “the best in the world”. For that price, it better be!

Solarin has been in development for the last two and a half years and was finally launched this week, during a high-profile event in London. Its makers say it has the best display, the best smartphone camera, the loudest and richest speakers, more 4G LTE bands than any other phone and Wi-Fi speeds up to ten times faster than today’s networks. Sounds like a Trump product, doesn’t it? But’s it’s not, we checked. Solarin is the first product of Sirin Labs, an Israeli startup targeting the premium sector.

Those claims are certainly very impressive – although reports state that the reality is a little bit different – but what’s supposed to really set Solarin apart from all other commercially available handhelds is the unmatched security it offers. “Solarin comes with Zimperium state-of-the-art mobile threat protection that thwarts the broadest array of advanced device, network, and application mobile cyberattacks, without impairing usability or functionality of a top-of-the-range smartphone,” a Sirin Labs press release claims. “In addition, Solarin incorporates the most advanced privacy technology, currently unavailable outside the agency world. Sirin Labs partnered with KoolSpan to integrate chip-to-chip 256-bit AES encryption, the same technology that militaries around the world use to protect their communications, offering the strongest possible mobile privacy protection worldwide.”

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When MIT-trained engineer Todd Rider revealed his revolutionary idea for killing virtually any virus, everyone from fellow scientists to The White House praised him for his results, with some going as far as to call his discovery the most important medical breakthrough since antibiotics. Yet four years later, Rider is struggling to find funds for his research and has to turn to online crowdfunding for something that could save the lives of millions.

The story of Todd Rider’s quest to rid the world of viruses began over 15 years ago, when, while in the shower, he came up with a radical idea in his head – what if there was some way to kill viruses by flipping their biologic suicide switches leaving the patient healthy and infection free? For the next decade, he and his colleagues worked on the concept of Broad-Spectrum Antiviral Therapeutics, which proposed a whole new approach to tackling viruses. Instead of containing and preventing viral infections, their method actually killed virus-infected cells, without harming normal cells.

In early tests, this new weapon dubbed Double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) Activated Caspase Oligomerizer (DRACO), eliminated 15 pathogens, from the common cold to H1N1 influenza to hemorrhagic fevers like the dengue virus. It proved effective across 11 human cell types, including heart, kidneys and liver, and mice infected with lethal doses of influenza virus were cured with DRACO treatments.

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While most 10-year-olds are busy playing games, learning the ropes at school and enjoying their childhood, Janna Jihad risks her life reporting on the Palestinian – Israeli conflict in the occupied West Bank, in an effort to raise awareness to the plight of her people.

A resident of Nabi Saleh, a small Palestinian village north of the West Bank city of Ramallah, Janna has been a witness to the tragedies of war from a very young age. Her mother, Nawal, says she was traumatized after one of her friends was shot dead by the Israeli army. “He was older than her but used to always be friendly and nice to her so that she became attached to him. When she saw his blood on the ground, she became frantic.”  She used to pen her feelings and frustrations in a locked journal every night, but the deaths of two of her relatives – her cousin, Mustafa Tamimi, and another uncle, Rushdie Tamimi – inspired her to get involved and reveal the injustice the people in her village are being subjected to.

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Most conferences tend to be boring, although not intentionally so. But there is one event that is deliberately dedicated to all things dull and tedious – the ‘Boring Conference’ hosted every year at London. Believe it or not, it’s a sell-out event where attendees are treated to talks on all sorts of boring things like paper bags, toilet roll quality control, lamp posts, and bricks.

How did such a thing as a Boring Conference come to exist, you ask? Well, it all started in 2010, when the man in charge of organizing an even called the Interesting Conference canceled the whole thing, saying that he was too busy. James Ward, an English book author and marketer, replied to the announcement, saying that he liked boring things and that they should be celebrated too. His social media post got a lot of people interested in a possible event about boring things and he started getting questions about where to buy tickets for it. That year, Ward organized the world’s first Boring Conference.

This year’s Boring Conference, held at London’s Conway Hall on 7 May, was the sixth consecutive event in the last six years and all 425 tickets were sold out in just a few days. Ward always opens up the event himself, because he likes to “set the bar low”. If people start with poor expectations, then the show can only improve, he says. Last year, he spoke about postcard photos of the old Post Office Tower.

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A strange ‘space-out competition’ recently saw 60 South Koreans in the country’s capital of Seoul put aside their smartphones and tablets and simply sit on the ground in a public park, thinking and doing nothing for 90 minutes. The person measured as having the most stable heart rate at the end of that period was judged the winner.

With more than 80% of its 50 million-strong population owning a smartphone, South Korea is considered one of the world’s ‘most wired’ countries. National statistics show that users spend an average of four hours a day tweeting, texting or playing video games on their handhelds, and about 15% show symptoms of addiction. This growing fixation with technology and the internet is seen as a serious problem, so to give people a chance to disconnect, if only for a short time, and promote a life free of information overload, a group of artists came up with the Space Out Competition.

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British theme park Alton Towers is giving fast food a whole new meaning with its-newly opened ‘Rollercoaster Restaurant’ where dishes are delivered to patrons via – you guessed it – tiny rollercoasters. For an attraction famous for its adrenaline pumping rides, this is the perfect eatery.

When you enter the Rollercoaster Restaurant, an employee will seat you at your table and explain how to use a tablet to order food, which will travel to your table via a 26-foot rollercoaster with two gravity-defying loop-the-loops. But here’s the catch – you share a rollercoaster with three other tables, so there’s no way of telling whether the dish on the way is the one you ordered or not.

Once it makes its way down to the bottom, the dish will plant itself on a massive lazy suzan, along with a flag displaying the table number. If it happens to be yours, you can simply rotate the lazy susan towards your table and help yourself. Thankfully, the food arrives in closed containers and drinks arrive in bottles to avoid spillage, while hot beverages like tea and coffee are served the regular way – by hand.

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American ballet dancer Erik Cavanaugh is proving to the world that plus-size performers can be just as agile and graceful as their slim counterparts. His Instagram is filled with photographs and videos of himself performing ballet and other contemporary dance routines. He hopes to appear in music videos and on the Ellen Show, and his ultimate goal is to “change the mind and shape of dancers”.

Erik, 23, works at a pizza parlor by day and spends all his spare time dancing and choreographing. He learned the basics of dance at the Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts School when he was much younger, and was encouraged to post videos of his performances online by his dance coach at his alma mater, Slippery Rock University.

Some of his short video clips feature him pulling off incredibly difficult and impressive moves, like multiple pirouettes, set to contemporary music like Justin Bieber’s Purpose and Jordan Smith’s Settle. The New York Post featured a compilation of Erik’s moves in a Facebook video, which went viral, inspiring millions around the world.

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Translation technology has just reached a whole new level with ‘Pilot’ – the world’s first smart earpiece that can translate foreign languages in real time. So two people who speak different languages can actually understand each other using Pilot, and engage in a normal conversation.

Developed by New York-based Waverly Labs, Pilot is a three-part system – two small Bluetooth earbuds, one for each interlocutor, and a smartphone app doing the actual translation. So you and this other person speak normally – each in your own language – and the Waverly Labs app translates and sends a voice with the other person’s speech to the earpiece. There will obviously be some delay, so it’s not exactly real time, but it’s pretty close. The initial version will support a number of European languages (English, Spanish, French, Italian). Other languages, like Hindi, Semitic, East Asian, Arabic, Slavic, and African will be included in subsequent versions, but you’ll have to pay for them, unless you preorder the system.

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Growing up, I would have accepted a dingy old shack for a playhouse and considered it the coolest place in the world. But these days it’s possible for kids to enjoy luxury playhouses that cost just as much as full-size homes, thanks to ‘La Petite Maison’, a  business run by American architect Alan Mower.

Working with interior designer Michelle Pollak, Mower creates what he claims are ‘the most luxurious playhouses in the world’. The structures are built using architectural stylings from around the world, including a Tudor-themed house, a Mediterranean playhouse, a San Diego villa, a saloon-like Tom Sawyer house, and more. Most of these houses have two floors and the interiors are decorated with bespoke furniture that would look great in any normal size house. Electricity and water are included, and air conditioning and heating cost extra.

Of course, these exclusive playhouses will cost you an arm and a leg. Or an hour’s earnings, depending on how rich you are. A basic model playhouse is priced at a $9,000, but the cost can go up to a whopping $75,000 depending on what extra features you opt for. But that’s nothing compared to what celebrity parents Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are spending on the playhouse they’ve commissioned Mower to build for their two-year-old daughter. It’s going to be a $146,000 mansion, complete with a walk-in closet, kitchen, a loft, a reading nook, and a living room with a functional fireplace.

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