Rocket Road is a unique clothing brand aimed not at humans, but at robots of all shapes and sizes. It aims to offer customization options and seamlessly bridge the gap between humans and machines. Last month, Japanese company Rocket Road announced the launch of its first lineup of functional protective cover wear for robotic arms. These decorative and functional covers are available in over 40 different colors, can be made out of dustproof, anti-bacterial, water repellent or heat-resistant material, and are meant to brighten up the otherwise bland working environment and provide the robotic arms with a bit of personality. But this is only the company’s latest project. Rocket Road has been creating robot clothing for a long time now and has quite an impressive portfolio. Read More »

A woman who had exhausted all other options of treating her depression claims her life has become infinitely better since having a matchbox-sized implanted into her skull. Having holes drilled into your skull and electrical wires connected directly to your brain sounds like a daunting proposition for most people, but for Sarah, a 36-year-old woman who had been battling depression for years, it was a desperate attempt to get back to a normal life. For years, she had been battling severe depression, and all other treatments, including anti-depressants and electroconvulsive therapy, had failed. Anything was better than the darkness she had been experiencing, and getting a brain implant proved a winning bet, as she has now been depression-free for over a year. Read More »

‘Ridiculous No.55 Lobster and Crab Butter’ is a decadent handmade butter made by a family company in the UK. It has been voted one of the world’s finest foods by a panel of 355 judges. If you love food as much as I do, you probably know that there is nothing better than butter. But not all butter is created equal. For example, the ‘Ridiculous No.55 Lobster and Crab Butter’ made by UK-based family company Sublime Butter tastes nothing like the classic dairy product most of us pick up at the supermarket. Not only is it whisked to perfection out of the finest milk fats, but it is mixed in with bits of shellfish (lobster and Devon Crab), as well as caviar, fennel, and lemon to create a truly decadent spread. Read More »

An Australian man who had been on the run for nearly three decades turned himself in recently, after being rendered homeless by the pandemic and struggling to find work. On the night of August 1, 1992, 13 months into his three-and-a-half-year sentence for growing marijuana, Darko “Dougie” Desic escaped from the Grafton Correctional Centre in New South Wales, using tools, including a hacksaw blade and bolt cutters. Despite an extensive search, authorities were never able to locate Desic, and he remained a fugitive for the next 29 years. So imagine everyone’s surprise when he just turned up at a police station one day to turn himself in after all this time. As it turns out, it was all because of the Covid-19 pandemic, as the lockdown in NSW had left Desic homeless and with no way to support himself. Read More »

“Middlemist’s Red,” also known as the spring rose, is widely regarded as the world’s rarest flower, as just two of these precious plants exist, one in New Zealand and another in the UK. Named after John Middlemist, who collected it in China in 1804, the Middlemist’s Red camelia was always a rare flower that could only be found in the stately English homes of well-off families who could afford to buy them. Middlemist himself donated his specimen to Kew Gardens, but it somehow vanished, along with the others throughout London and the whole of the UK, with the exception of one place. By 1823, the Chiswick House & Gardens, a stately home in England, became the only place in the UK where a Middlemist’s Red could be admired. Read More »

At first glance, the humble hagfish looks like just another species of ocean-dwelling eel, but they are something much weirder and at the same time fascinating. From the bizarre slime-like substance it produces as a defense mechanism, to the lack of a backbone, there’s a whole lot of weirdness to address. The hagfish is a primitive, virtually blind creature that spends its life on the bottom of the ocean, slithering and feeding mostly on dead or dying fish. Among the several things that make the hagfish unique is its body structure. It has a skull, but no jaw and no vertebral column. This allows them to tie their bodies into knots in order to scrape the sticky slime they produce off of their skin. They can burrow into dead or dying animals through various orifices and even through their skin – using two rows of keratinous teeth – and devour them from the inside. But they don’t really need the teeth, as they can absorb nutrients through the skin and can go months without eating. Pretty freaky stuff, and we haven’t even talked about their slime-producing capabilities. Read More »

Nicolas Gentile, a 37-year-old fan of Tolkien’s fantasy, decided he wanted more than just to read about the life of his favorite characters, the hobbits, so he started living as a real-life hobbit himself. A pastry chef by training, Nicolas Gentile grew up reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and watching the popular Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movie trilogies. He had always been a fan of fantasy literature, movies, and games, but it was Middle Earth that captured his imagination the most. Only at one point, reading about and imagining the world and characters he loved wasn’t enough anymore. Gentile was tired of experiencing the adventures of others and decided that he could be a character in his very own real-life adventure, so he decided to start living as a hobbit. Read More »

They say women are from Venus and men are from Mars, and nowhere is that more evident than in Ubang, a unique Nigerian rural community where men and women have their own separate languages. It’s hard to believe that men and women who grow up together in the same community can end up speaking different languages, but in the case of Ubang’s residents, it’s totally true. It’s not exactly clear what proportion of the words in the men’s and women’s languages are different, but there are enough examples to make sentences sound different when spoken by the opposite sex. For example, for ‘clothing’ men use the word ‘nki’, while women say ‘ariga’; ‘kitchi’ means tree for men, while women say ‘okweng’. These are not just some subtle pronunciation differences, but totally different words and it’s been like this for as long as anyone can remember. Read More »

Residents of Nordelta, Argentina’s most famous and arguably most beautiful gated community, have been battling hordes of capybaras, giant, adorable rodents that act like they own the place because technically they do… A 1,500ha suburban development built on the wetlands of the Paraná, the second most important river in South America after the Amazon, Nordelta is home to some 40,000 people, many of whom paid a premium to own a home in what is a stunning location. Positioned just north of Buenos Aires, among picturesque lakes and streams. Nordelta is one of the most coveted places to own a home, but also one of the most contested by environmentalists, who contest its reason for existing. That’s because the wetlands it was built on were the home of various species of plants and animals, including capybaras, who have now returned to reclaim their rightful place. Read More »

Welwitschia is a fascinating plant that can not only survive for several thousands of years, but it can do so in one of the most inhospitable environments on the planet, the Namib Desert. Named after Austrian botanist Friedrich Welwitsch, who discovered it in Angola in 1859, Welwitschia is actually called ‘tweeblaarkanniedood’ in Afrikaans, which translates to “two leaves that cannot die”. That’s a surprisingly accurate name for a plant that grows only two leaves and can survive thousands of years in the world’s oldest desert. Some parts of the Namib Desert receive less than two inches of precipitation a year, but that’s apparently all Welwitschia needs to survive, thanks to its extremely “efficient, low-cost genome”. Read More »

Burj Al Babas is an abandoned housing development in Turkey, which consists of hundreds of miniature Disney-like chateaus stretching out almost as far as the eye can see. It was supposed to be a bustling holiday retreat for the world’s super-rich, a neighborhood of castle-inspired villas spread around in a picturesque valley, near the the historic village of Mudurnu, in northwestern Turkey. Instead, today Burj Al Babas is one of the world’s largest ghost towns, featuring hundreds of unfinished villas, some of which have already started to deteriorate. It’s a story of big ambitions, sky-high property prices and economic woes that ultimately spelled the end of the dream that was Burj Al Babas. Read More »

A Ukrainian tiktoker who filmed himself giving a young girl on the street a new smartphone to get views on the popular video app, only to ask for it back once the “touching” scene was filmed, has sparked outrage on social media. From pulling cruel pranks on unsuspecting bystanders, to renting studios to make themselves look richer, there’s not a lot modern online influencers won’t do for clicks and views. But one young influencer in Russia crossed the line when he decided to heartlessly deceive a young girl by making her think she was getting a new smartphone for free, only to then ask for it back, claiming it was just props for a TikTok video. Things got really bad when the child understandably refused to hand over her gift. Read More »

Scientists and fire crews in California recently discovered a giant sequoia tree that is still smoldering and smoking, almost a year after the surrounding area was devastated by massive wildfires. The 2020 Castle Fire, which broke out in August of last year and scorched more than 150,000 acres of land, including at least 10 sequoia groves in the region. No one knows how many of these ancient giants were destroyed by the blaze, but one thing is for sure, at least one of them is still smoldering and smoking, almost a year after. National Park Service staff made the shocking discovery earlier this month, while conducting surveys in the area to assess the damage caused by last year’s wildfire. One of them noticed plumes of smoke rising in the distance, and, using a long camera lens, tracked it down to a single sequoia. Read More »

Most bridges in North Carolina have a 15-foot clearance, but the one at the intersection of Gregson and Peabody streets in Durham is over 100 years old, so it has a clearance of 11 feet 8 inches. That’s pretty rare, so many drivers don’t really pay attentions to the warning signs and they become a victim of the famous can opener bridge. Over the years, Durham’s 11’8″ bridge in damaged well over 100 trucks. It has become such a problem that state authorities went out of their way to mark it as an unusually low clearance bridge, in the hope that most overheight truck drivers would turn back. But the thing is a lot o them don’t pay attention to the signs, and by the time they realize they may not fit, it’s too late. In the end, the state had no choice but to break the piggy bank and lift the old train bridge by 20 centimeters, to avoid accidents, but that doesn’t seem to have done much good, as the can opener recently claimed its 167th victim.

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A 23-year-old university student was recently sentenced to two and a half years in prison for swindling KFC out of about $31,000 in fast food, by taking advantage of an ordering loophole. The student, surnamed Xu first discovered the glitch in 2018, and not only continued to use it to his benefit for the next six months, but he also shared it with friends and even profited financially from it. The Jiangsu-based student accidentally realized that he could order free food by paying for it using coupons in the official KFC app, and then immediately asking for a refund of the coupons using the company’s WeChat account. It was any KFC’s fan dream come true, all the fried chicken you could eat, totally free. Read More »