Watch firefighters rescue rat stuck in manhole cover

On Sunday in Bensheim, Germany, two children spotted a rat stuck in the vent of a manhole cover. Animal welfare organization Berufstierrettung Rhein-Neckar sent out two rescue workers who were unable to free the rodent. From Smithsonian:

That’s when things get surreal. The 8-member Auerbach volunteer fire brigade soon arrived on the scene wearing their firefighting gear and began a 25-minute rescue operation posted on YouTube. First they subdued the rat around the neck using a pole with a restraining loop at the end. Then, using large, black professional-looking wedges they popped up the heavy manhole cover and animal rescuer Michael Sehr was able to wiggle and work the portly little nibbler loose before releasing him back into the sewer.

The children who first found the rat also thanked the firefighters with a handmade, rat-themed thank you card.

Here's video of the operation:

Herbal company fined $12.8 million after paying for fake Amazon reviews

In the first ever case of its kind, the Federal Trade Commission just reached a settlement that includes a $12.8 million fine against an herbal supplement company that paid for fake five-star reviews to boost its Amazon sales.

The fraudulent company, Cure Encapsulations, contacted a site that churns out fake reviews — amazonverifiedreviews.com (now taken down) — and told them, "“Please make my product … stay a five star." They then paid the sleazy site "$1,000 for 30 reviews in order to bump the product’s ratings," according to Mashable.

Along with the falsified reviews purporting to be from actual customers, the FTC also alleged that the company made “false and unsubstantiated claims” for the pills known as Quality Encapsulations Garcinia Cambogia.

Garcinia cambogia is a tropical fruit found in Indonesia that has been used as a natural aid for weight loss. As The Verge points out, use of the herbal supplement has associated with acute liver failure.

“People rely on reviews when they’re shopping online,” said director of the commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection Andrew Smith in a statement. “When a company buys fake reviews to inflate its Amazon ratings, it hurts both shoppers and companies that play by the rules.”

Along with the hefty fine, Cure Encapsulations is also banned "from making weight-loss, appetite-suppression, fat-blocking, or disease-treatment claims for any dietary supplement, food, or drug unless they have competent and reliable scientific evidence in the form of human clinical testing supporting the claims," according to the FTC.

You mean they're still allowed to run a business? Buyers beware!

Image: Robert Nelson/Flickr

The latest marble chain reaction video is the best so far

Blue Marble 3 is Kaplamino's latest marble chain reaction video. I like the way that many parts of the track are formed as needed by the energy of rubber bands, deflating balloons, magnets, and even a firecracker.

From the YouTube description:

I present you my most ambitious project so far, blue marble 3 ! I'm out of my comfort zone this time because the chain reaction is taking place on two tables, and with 0 fidget spinners. It is the longest in terms of duration and the one that takes up the most space in my room. I tried to use a little bit of everything like rubber bands, magnets, and elements. I had so many failures that I stopped counting, as always only a few tricks were responsible for the majority of failures, can you guess which ones?

Image: YouTube

This website is a Hot-or-Not for fake people

Mike Solomon, creative director at Hearst Digital Media, created Judge Fake People. Here's what he wrote about it on his website, The Cleverest:

Like many internet addicts, I was blown away by NVIDEO’s demo using style-based Generative Adversarial Networks to generate faces. They seem to have crossed a threshold for generating artificial images that can genuinely fool our brains.

Flash forward to last week when I saw Philip Wang’s amazing single-serving website thispersondoesosxist.com.

It was fascinating to see a photo-realistic face of someone that doesn’t exist. Philip’s writeup does a great job explaining his motivations and this implications behind this groundbreaking technology.

But I just wanted to turn it into hot or not.

So I wrote a script to download an image from thispersondoesnotexist.com every 5 seconds and built up a collection of around two thousand fake people. Then I made a voting system with php/MySQL and some filters to show the highest and lowest rated faces. And I enabled comments just for fun.