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Finally, we have an engineer who’s putting his degree to proper use! 27-year-old Londoner Alex Bygrave has used all his technical know-how to come up with the ultimate invention – an awesome Gatling water gun. Believed to be the world’s most sophisticated Gatling-style weapon of its kind, the gun features a 10-liter water tank, six barrels and a 40-foot firing range.

Alex spent 50 hours designing and building the pistol from scratch, making use of 55 separate parts made of everyday objects. “I had to first break down the mechanics of how the Gatling gun worked, and then build it up using a mix of all sorts of components,” he said.

The VideoLan project was originally started as an academic project in 1996. VLC used to stand for "VideoLAN Client" when VLC was a client of the VideoLAN project. But since VLC is no longer merely a client, that initialism no longer applies.

It was intended to consist of a client and server to stream videos across a campus network. Originally developed by students at the École Centrale Paris, it is now developed by contributors worldwide and is coordinated by VideoLAN, a non-profit organization.

Rewritten from scratch in 1998, it was released under GNU General Public License on 1 February 2001, with authorization from the headmaster of the École Centrale Paris. The functionality of the server program, VideoLan Server (VLS), has mostly been subsumed into VLC and has been deprecated. The project name has been changed to VLC media player because there is no longer a client/server infrastructure.

The cone icon used in VLC is a reference to the traffic cones collected by École Centrale's Networking Students' Association. The cone icon design was changed from a hand drawn low resolution icon to a higher resolution CGI-rendered version in 2006, illustrated by Richard Øiestad.

The 2013 Global Drugs Survey reported that drug dealing on the internet was on the rise. This may have been shocking news to a lot of people, but the truth is that marijuana was the very first thing ever to have been sold and bought on the internet. The first bag of this "herb" was sold online over 40 years ago!

In the early 1970s, Stanford students at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory engaged in a drug deal with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, using Arpanet accounts. They used the network to arrange the purchase of undetermined amounts of marijuana.

All types of drugs—legal and illegal—have since been sold on the internet. In 2012, researchers found 73 new types of drugs being sold by about 700 websites in Europe. In the 60s, 70s and 80s the drug menu mainly consisted of marijuana, LSD, cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines. Today the list is mind-blowing and many of those are even legal.

Unfortunately, many of the new drugs sold on the internet today are untested, rare compounds of unknown purity that are sold by unscrupulous drug dealers. These people have no concern for the well-being of their customers. As these compounds were never designed to be drugs, they can lead to sickness, high blood-pressure, and kidney failure.

Drug sales on the internet are accelerating and millions of drug deals are taking place each year. It seems the drug trade has reached an all time "high."

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.”

A woman starved to death after embarking on a spiritual journey which involved giving up food and water and attempting to exist on nothing but sunlight.

The Swiss woman, who was in her fifties, apparently got the idea after watching the documentary film ‘In the Beginning, There Was Light’ which features an Indian guru who claims to not have eaten anything in 70 years.

The Zurich newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reported Wednesday that the unnamed woman decided to follow the radical fast in 2010

In a series of experiments, people who counted money felt less pain when their hands were dipped into scalding water. The soothing power of cash also helped them shrug off the emotional pain of social exclusion.