Naked Man Climbs Famous London Statue

source - Wacky News

“Whitehall was full of red faces as police frantically tried to grab the bare man who was posing on the monument to Prince George. Tourists were shocked today when they tried to take pictures of Nelson’s Column – but ended up with a London Eye-ful instead. It was in fact a naked man who had straddled a statue in the city and brought traffic to a standstill for hours. Whitehall was full of red faces as police frantically tried to grab the bare man who was posing on the monument to Prince George. At one point he balanced precariously on the Duke of Cambridge’s head, as Lord Nelson looked on in the background.”

Diner Makes Burger So Spicy Customers Need To Sign Disclaimer

Source - Wacky News

“A Bristol diner has produced a burger so spicy that those wanting to order it must prove they are over 18 and also sign a disclaimer. The Atomic Fallout Pizza burger requires consumers to wear protective gloves and comes drenched in a sauce that’s made from two of the fieriest chillies in the world, the Scotch Bonnet and Naga Bhut Jolokia (Ghost Chilli). The combination of spices means the sauce measures in on the Scoville Scale at an eye watering 1million units. Not only is the sandwich spicy, it also packs in a considerable amount of calories.”

World's Youngest VC-Funded Entrepreneur?

By Maeghan Ouimet | Inc

Move over Brian Wong. You my have lost your title as the youngest-funded entrepreneur. The new contender is a 16-year-old kid who has raised $1 million for his news summary app. For the record, he was only 15 when he received his first chunk of that change.

Nick D’Alosio’s story starts like any high school kid’s might: on spring break. The London-based teenager was on vacation with his pals when he received an email from a group of investors in Hong Kong. D’Alosio admits he almost didn’t open it. “Who are these guys?,” he wondered. Turns out, “these guys” were from Li Ka Shing’s Horizons Ventures (the same Horizons Ventures that has invested in both Facebook and Spotify). Horizons wanted to know more about the news-summarizing app (then called Trimit) D'Alosio had built and released months earlier in the Apple’s UK App store.

“I had just signed on to Twitter and I was using their mobile app. The problem was, I noticed that I wasn’t clicking through to the full content--it took far too long to download and it just wasn’t optimized for mobile. I thought why not produce summaries,” D’Alosio says of the initial idea. The teen has been building applications since age 12.

With Horizon’s initial $300,000 investment a year ago--and its connections--D'Alosio was able to demo his app (now called Summly) to a small group of investors in December. That led to more funding from big names like Ashton Kutcher, Mark Pincus, Yoko Ono, and others.

“News on mobile is fundamentally broken,” D’Alosio explains. “It’s not the personalization element that needs to change--it’s the content. A lot of start-ups are trying to solve personalization, but this is a step beyond that. People are just fundamentally not interacting with the content itself, that’s the issue. We’ve tried to algorithmically come up with a solution."

D'Alosio has used the $1 million to hire "some serious scientists" to improve on his original algorithm.

The algorithm works by selecting words from a given article to build a summary that will perfectly fit onto the screen of your iPhone--no more scrolling to read or waiting to load. If you want to read the entire article after the summary, access to it is a swipe away.

Despite the fact that he now must worry about things like business plans and investors and that he's been named a digital wunderkind by some media outlets, D'Alosio says he still wants to finish high school and attend university.

“A lot of people my age are doing what I’m doing. They’re doing tech, but they’re still in school. It just so happens that the Hong Kong people got in touch with me, but otherwise I’m just like anyone else my age,” D’Alosio says. “I didn’t think I’d be able to build a company at all. I believed in the idea, but because I was so young I didn’t think that people would take it seriously.”

For now, he hopes to continue working on Summly--though he admits he has other ideas. And D’Alosio wants to fill some big shoes. He looks to Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Instagram’s Kevin Systrom for inspiration. So, does he think Summly will sell to Facebook for $1 billion?

“Yeah,” he says, and laughs. “Let’s hope.”

Funny signs from around the world

Just in case you weren’t sure, these designated trees are officially big.(Dale O'Dell / Alamy)

By Joshua Pramis | Travel+Leisure

Signs can be our biggest allies; they can also lead us far astray. Either way, we rely on them heavily—especially in unfamiliar places—so we take care to read every word. And sometimes, what we see is, well, hilarious.

Whether the language is unintentionally misleading or lost in translation, or an illustration isn’t quite right, it makes for a shareable moment. So the camera comes out and the photo goes up—on our social media profiles, Flickr pages, blogs, and the community section of TravelandLeisure.com. We pulled the photos from T+L members that made us laugh, in hopes that they’d work the same magic on you.

Some signs have questionable (or no) punctuation; others are meant to be funny. And some are just downright strange. All of them make our journey more interesting—and amusing.

What? You thought candy corn was synthetic? Silly. (Rikki John de Castro)

A.k.a., the official club of the silver-lining supporters.(Chris Radley)

Other funny signs click here http://travel.yahoo.com/ideas/funny-signs-from-around-the-world.html

Japan Earthquake Caused Long-Lasting Stress in Dogs

By Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer | LiveScience.com

 Family dogs caught up in the Japan earthquake of 2011 and subsequent nuclear disaster at Fukushima showed signs of stress not inconsistent with PTSD long after the events, a new study finds.

The research compared abandoned dogs rescued from Fukushima with non-disaster affected dogs abandoned in 2009 and 2010, before the earthquake. The dogs that lived through the disaster had stress hormone levels five to 10 times higher than the dogs that were simply abandoned or found as strays.

"Long-term care and concern regarding the psychological impact of disasters appears necessary in humans and companion animals," the researchers wrote today (Oct. 11) in the journal Scientific Reports.

As part of a dog-rehabilitation program at Azabu University in Japan, researchers took in eight dogs from shelters in Kanagawa Prefecture and measured their levels of physical stress by monitoring the stress hormone cortisol in the dogs' urine. After the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, thousands of refugees were forced to abandon their dogs. Many of the animals lived a semi-feral existence in areas made uninhabitable for humans by the Fukushima nuclear plant meltdown that followed the disaster.

In May and November 2011, the Azabu University team took in 17 abandoned dogs collected at shelters and rescue centers in Fukushima. These dogs, like the Kanagawa canines, were rehabilitated and had their cortisol levels monitored daily. All dogs were later adopted by new owners.

When compared with the Kanagawa dogs, the Fukushima dogs were less aggressive toward unfamiliar people but also less attached to caregivers and more difficult to train. The disaster-affected dogs had five to 10 times the cortisol levels of dogs not touched by disaster, a gap that narrowed but did not close even after 10 weeks of loving care in the rehabilitation program.

The Fukushima dogs' handicaps in trainability echo learning problems in human trauma survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder, the researchers wrote. They suggested that similar brain chemicals could be at play in dogs and humans. Trauma-impaired humans can also struggle to bond with others, similar to the Fukushima dogs' lack of attachment to their caregivers.

The researchers warned that the samples were small and not entirely equivalent, with the Fukushima dogs being older, on average, than the Kanagawa dogs. Nevertheless, they found no evidence that age affected how dogs responded to abandonment, suggesting the disaster was the biggest driver of the dogs' stress.

"Humans affected by the disaster are already recovering and gradually returning to normal life," the researchers wrote. "However, our results suggest the possibility that stress can induce excessive, deep psychosomatic impacts with implicit behavioral manifestations, such as deficits in attachment and learning ability also in dogs."

Amazing 'human towers' contest

The 'Castellers' who build the human towers with precise techniques compete in groups, known as 'colles', at local festivals with aim to build the highest and most complex human tower. The Catalan tradition is believed to have originated from human towers built at the end of the 18th century by dance groups and is part of the Catalan culture.

 

TARRAGONA, SPAIN - OCTOBER 07: Members of the Colla 'Vella de Valls' start a construction of a human tower during the 24th Tarragona Castells Comptetion on October 7, 2012 in Tarragona, Spain. The 'Castellers' who build the human towers with precise techniques compete in groups, known as 'colles', at local festivals with aim to build the highest and most complex human tower. The Catalan tradition is believed to have originated from human towers built at the end of the 18th century by dance groups and is part of the Catalan culture. (Photo by David Ramos/Getty Images)

source Yahoo.com

102-Year-Old Gets A Full-Ride Scholarship To The University Of Michigan

By Matthew Boesler | Business Insider

102-year-old Margaret Dunning is going back to finish her degree at the University of Michigan after 80 years in the real world, and she's getting a full scholarship to do it.

During the Great Depression, Dunning had to drop out of U of M to work for her mother – and she never ended up going back.

After Dunning was featured in a TODAY.com article for her passion about cars, auto products manufacturer The FRAM Group decided to honor her with a scholarship and send her back to get her degree.

NBC's Today Show has the story:

Still, the idea of returning to school after all these decades has filled Dunning with a rush of excitement. She said she figures she has about a year to go before completing her degree, and she’s already plotting out her commute to the university campus in Ann Arbor.

“I’ll have to figure out just what I’ll study, but it will be in business, though — I know that,” she said. “I’m still running a business right now. ... It’s a trust fund.”

“I’m very, very pleased about it,” she said. “I feel that I’ve been granted a few years that other people do not have, and I am really very happy that I have this beautiful old world to live in.”