A shortage of bears' traditional food near the Arctic Circle has forced the animals to eat human corpses, say locals.

From a distance it resembled a rather large man in a fur coat, leaning tenderly over the grave of a loved one. But when the two women in the Russian village of Vezhnya Tchova came closer they realised there was a bear in the cemetery eating a body.

Russian bears have grown so desperate after a scorching summer they have started digging up and eating corpses in municipal cemetries, alarmed officials said today. Bears' traditional food – mushrooms, berries and the odd frog – has disappeared, they added.

The Vezhnya Tchova incident took place on Saturday in the northern republic of Komi, near the Arctic Circle. The shocked women cried in panic, frightening the bear back into the woods, before they discovered a ghoulish scene with the clothes of the bear's already-dead victim chucked over adjacent tombstones, the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Komsomelets reported.

Local people said that bears had resorted to scavenging in towns and villages - rummaging through bins, stealing garden carrots and raiding tips. A young man had been mauled in the centre of Syktyvkar, Komi's capital.

"They are really hungry this year. It's a big problem. Many of them are not going to survive," said Simion Razmislov, the vice-president of Komi's hunting and fishing society.

World Wildlife Fund Russia said there had been a similar case two years ago in the town of Kandalaksha, in the northern Karelia republic. "You have to remember that bears are natural scavengers.

In the US and Canada you can't leave any food in tents in national parks," said Masha Vorontsova, Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in Russia.

"In Karelia one bear learned how to do it [open a coffin]. He then taught the others," she added, suggesting: "They are pretty quick learners."

The only way to get rid of the bears would be to frighten them with something noisy like a firework or shoot them, she said.

According to Vorontsova, the omnivorous bears had "plenty to eat" this autumn, with foods such as fish and ants at normal levels.

The bears raided graveyards because they offered a supply of easy food, she said, a bit like a giant refrigerator. "The story is horrible.

Nobody wants to think about having a much loved member of their family eaten by a bear."

The bear population in Russia is relatively stable with numbers between 120,000 and 140,000.

The biggest threat isn't starvation but hunting - with VIP sportsmen and wealthy gun enthusiasts wiping out most of the large male bears in Kamchatka, in Russia's Far East.

Chinese poachers have killed many black bears near the border, selling their claws and other parts in markets.

The Russian government is drafting legislation to ban the killing of bears during the breeding season.

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“I don't know if many of you have French-kissed your mother. God, it is some thing else. We moved on to oral sex, but it took ages for me to get her to let me enter her,” says Jersey on the Consensual Incest Chat Forum. Consensual incest has been around for millenia but it still has the power to shock. Why?

Having kids with your nearest and dearest will probably result in a baby seeping brains from its mouth, but for a surprisingly large community, screwing your relatives comes as naturally as not screwing them does for the rest of us.

MLN from New Mexico says, “There are many of us who are lovers with our sister or daughter. I am a widower and my daughter has replaced my wife as a sex partner. We have a lovely two-and-a-half-year-old daughter.”

It's pretty mental. The forum offers friendly advice on how to seduce your dad (wrestling, apparently), or at what age it is appropriate to give your son head.

One mother defends her three-year relationship with her son, saying she didn’t consider him for sex until he turned 18. Another girl has had sex with all three of her brothers, but they all love each other and are now in non-incestuous happy marriages.

Incestboard.com has over 59,000 registered users accessing the video, photo, and chat content. Perhaps some of these people only fantasize about incest as breaking the ultimate taboo, but others are definitely gnoshing their way through the family tree.

According to the great anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss, the incest taboo forms the foundation of civilization by forcing man to find a mate outside of the home.

Other people argue it is has a genetic basis, to lower the incidence of congenital defects caused by inbreeding. However, banging your family is so common throughout history it is present in the mythology of almost every culture.

King Arthur had a child, Mordred, with his sister Morgause. Egyptian god lovers Osiris and Iris were brother and sister.

Greek gods Zeus and his wife Hera were brother and sister, as were their parents, Cronus and Rhea. The most famous mother-f*cker is obviously Oedipus; though that turned out badly for everyone concerned.

Incest was encouraged in Egyptian royal families to safeguard the royal bloodline. They were gods, and gods don’t do it with mortals. Cleopatra VII married two of her younger brothers. Her mother and father, Cleopatra V and Ptolemy XII, had also been brother and sister.

The Incas and the Hawaiians also practiced incest in their royal families, while in the Roman-Egyptian census, brother-sister marriage accounts for about 20 percent of all listed.

Even though it was eventually outlawed, that didn’t stop Emperor Caligula having sex with all three of his sisters, Julia Livilla, Drusilla, and Agrippina the Younger - although he was also a famous sexual psychopath so his behavior was hardly standard for the time.

While the incest taboo exists in most communities throughout history, the definition of what constitutes incest constantly changes. In some Amerindian societies in the Arctic, mothers would routinely stroke the penises of their sons, although this was considered non-sexual, like breast-feeding.

For hundreds of years, inbreeding was unavoidable in Iceland due to its then tiny and isolated population. In the 10th century, Pope John XII is said to have taken his niece and his mother as mistresses.

Despite anthropologists insistence that the incest taboo is fundamental to human nature, people have been at it forever. Freud famously argued that everyone’s first sexual desires are directed toward their family, while Melanie Klein considers sexual relations between siblings to be virtually the norm. The real taboo is perhaps mentioning that it isn't taboo at all.

Historian Lloyd DeMause argues that incest is universal. He cites examples throughout the world and refers to the old Indian proverb (“For a girl to be a virgin at ten years old, she must have neither brothers, nor cousins, nor fathers”) as an example of how common incest has been.

In fact, his examples are endless and worldwide: tribes who have sex dormitories where older adolescents initiate younger siblings into sex; households where parents incorporate the children into their sexual activity in one happy family orgy; fathers marrying daughters when the mother dies, and sons marrying mothers when the father dies. Clearly it gets darker than sitting on granddad's knee.

The 2005 case of the German couple , Patrick and Susan (above) who were separated as children and later met and fell in love, has made headlines. They’ve been together for nine years and have four children, three of whom are in care. He has served time in prison fighting for his right to love his sister.

Instinct tells you that it's monumentally screwed up but many ask why consensual incest is illegal, and why someone like Patrick should be imprisoned. The obvious answer is that it increases the chances of passing down bad genes. But by that logic, everyone with a genetic condition should be outlawed from having sex, which wouldn't be tolerated.

In fact, the impetus behind the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act was that the proponents of the act were the same people who advocated the "sterilisation" of the "feeble-minded".

Siblings generally don’t fancy each other due to something call the Westernak effect: Being reared together forms non-erotic bonds. But if you’re itching for incest, apparently you’re not alone.

Doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t be completely repulsed by it either.

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Supercars generally have the reputation for being gas-guzzlers as they rage across our roads with a need for speed. But the new Porsche 918 Spyder may be about to change all that - for while it manages a top speed of 201mph, it also manages an economic 94 miles to the gallon.

That makes the Porsche more economic than the car with one of the greenest reputations on the road - the Toyota Prius - which can manage 72.4mpg. The UK's biggest selling car, the Ford Fiesta, by contrast, manages just 78.5mpg.

The Porsche 918 Spyder will be able to accelerate from 0-62mph in less than three seconds - making it faster than most supercars on the market. The green Porsche works via a new hybrid system where two electric motors generate power alongside the car's 4.6-litre V8 engine.

The German-built vehicle will go into production in September next year - although it will cost a gobsmacking $1.5million. That must be the price of a car that can make Jeremy Clarkson green with envy without giving Greenpeace too many sleepless nights.

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The Crystal Lagoon at San Alfonso del Mar resort, Chile, is large enough for sailing and comes with its own fake beach. A quick dip could well turn into a marathon. Swimming a length in this, the world's largest outdoor pool, would mean stroke after stroke for more than three fifths of a mile - that's 20 Olympic-size swimming pools.

The enormous man-made lagoon is set halfway up the country's Pacific coast, in the city of Algarrobo, and is filled with 66 million gallons of crystal clear seawater. It also hold the Guinness record for the world's deepest - so if you don't feel like diving 115ft to the bottom, it might be best to bring some spare goggles.

The pool opened in December 2006 after nearly five years of construction work and is said to have set developers back as much as £1billion. And on top of that eye-watering initial cost, it takes a further £2million a year to keep it in working order.

It uses a computer-controlled suction and filtration system to suck water in from the ocean at one end and pump it out at the other, while the sun warms it to 26C - nine degrees higher than the sea. 

The pool's incredible dimensions leave the next biggest floundering in its wake, with the Orthlieb in Morocco measuring a mere 150 yards by 100 yards.

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Any developer with plans to build a multi-million-pound scheme in a housing area can expect to encounter the occasional gripe from a concerned local resident. But few could have predicted the lengths that one hard-headed homeowner would go to in trying to stop the construction of a £350 million luxury development in China.

Zou Mingcan has refused to make way for the scheme and has declared war on the builders by rigging his one-bedroom apartment with home-made weapons and booby traps. The stubborn 70-year-old, who lives on the sixth floor, can often be seen standing on the roof in a military camouflage uniform.

He keeps a terrifying array of Molotov cocktails and pelts approaching developers with bricks and rocks. In revenge, builders have crushed his car and left it flattened outside the apartment block in Kunming, Yunnan province, southern China.

Planners claim they warned Zou almost a year ago that the apartment block was scheduled for demolition as part of a huge expansion of the city's upmarket housing district. But Zou has told them he will not move until he is offered more compensation.

'I used to be a builder so I know all their tricks,' he said. 'They won't get me out of here until they pay me proper compensation. I know how much my flat is worth to them so they might as well pay up.'

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There is no way anyone could describe these toilets as bog standard.

This hilarious collection of toilets from around the world has become an internet sensation after they were posted on the blog Oddee.

The pick of the bunch are a set of obscure urinals which resemble coffins complete with a foot flush that are found in a restaurant toilet in Bogota, Colombia.

This men's urinal with a big red open mouth can be found in Frankfurt.

These urinals which resemble coffins complete with a foot flush are found in a restaurant toilet in Bogota.

There is also a bizarre line of urinals that are shaped like brass instruments in a pub in Freiburg, South Germany.

Another amusing latrine comes in the form of kitted out toilet that boasts a cushioned seat as well as a computer and phone close by designed clearly for the most avid workaholic.

These unusual urinals at a pub in Freiburg, South Germany, were put in by landlord Martin Hartmann.

This toilet gives the user a friendly welcome.

A pipe shaped toilet, a urinal in the form of a mouth, and a strange row of buckets make up the set.

This toilet complete with phones, a fax machine and PC is perfect for the workaholic.

These bucket urinals come with an incredible view of Bratislava.

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A 44-year-old Hawaiian surfer has officially been recognised by Guinness World Records for riding the biggest wave ever thought to have been ridden. Last November Garrett McNamara caught a 78ft wave at Nazare, off the coast of Portugal, beating the previous 2008 record by more than a foot.

McNamara began surfing at age 11 and became professional six years later. He has described his achievement as a stroke of luck and has used his feat to urge people to follow their passions.

The giant wave was located above an underwater canyon famous for being the world's biggest wave generator. McNamara said that on the day he broke the record, at first he'd not wanted to take a ride but his friends urged him to catch a few waves. "Everything came together. Everything felt right," he said.

Hundreds of thousands have viewed the video and photographs of McNamara's ride. They show his figure dwarfed by a giant wall of water.

"I knew it was big, but I didn't know how big," he said.

He later sent the footage and pictures to surfing expert Sean Collins, who guessed the wave was 85-90ft tall. Collins died in December.

Last week, McNamara was awarded $15,000 (11,600 euros) for the ride at the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Awards in California. Judges for the awards examined the footage and pictures from different angles.

They also compared McNamara's height in a crouch and the length of his shin bone with the wave's top and bottom before reaching a verdict, event director Bill Sharp told the Associated Press.

Commenting on the record, McNamara said: "The world would be a much better place if everyone was doing what they wanted to do."

However, the UK Guardian newspaper quoted him as saying: "I'm not sure I want to ride that peak again."

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It's like Ikea writ large - a firm of builders that claims it has mastered the art of flat pack and shown how a three storey block can be put up in just nine days. The Chinese construction company's innovative 'instant' building techniques recently allowed it to finish this workers' cafeteria.

Now the man behind it, Broad Sustainable Building CEO Zhang Yue, wants to build a 220-storey skyscraper, potentially the world's tallest, in just four months.

If he realises this ambition it will dwarf the Shard in London - Europe's tallest building - and put its completion time of more than three years to shame.

Under conventional methods the low-carbon canteen would have taken a year to complete, but here even the nine days it took to finish the building, in the city of Yueyang, in Hunan province, was considered a missed target.

This is par for the course for BSB, which conjured a 30-storey hotel in the same city over the course of just 15 days in December.

Mr Zhang said: 'In the past, when we said that in a day or so we could build a six story building, or in more than 10 days we could build a 30-story building, everyone said it was impossible, especially as we were building these buildings very cheaply, using even less money than is needed to build a traditional one.

'People say: "You're using so much so-called technology, isn't it expensive?" I say: "Firstly, I can build it that quickly, secondly, I can build it that cheaply, and thirdly, once it's built, it's more comfortable than the rest".'

Construction site director Xiao Changgeng said: 'The entire building process is extremely simple, and it doesn't require very experienced workers. It's very much like a child using modeling blocks to build a house.'

The concept is based on factory-made 'modules', which include all the necessary pipes and cables before they are slotted into place. This means more than 90 per cent of the work is done before the builders even arrive on site.

It also drives costs down, with the prefab buildings coming at a price of about 4,000 yuan (£396) per square metre. This means the 4,500-square-metre canteen came to a total of 18million yuan (£1.78million).

The flat modules, the largest of which are about 13ft by 49ft and form the buildings' floors and ceilings, are prepared in two factories in Yueyang, near the BSB headquarters in the provincial capital Changsha.

'It's very easy to learn the construction - all the workers need to do is fasten the bolts,' said Liu Zhijian, a 23-year-old site worker from the nearby city of Loudi.

'There's no welding, no dust, no water,' he said. 'It's not at all like traditional construction, which is all about bricks and concrete.'

Such rapid construction has become a necessity in China, where the building business is booming as urban populations explode and the industrial sector continues to expan

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Have you ever found yourself jealous of Captain James T. Kirk and his er intergalactic conquests? Do you longingly watch Jabba the Hutt’s dancing slave (her name is Oola, if you’re interested) and wonder, what if? Do you long to go where no man has gone before? Well, once a new sci-fi brothel, Alien Cathouse, opens in Nevada, you'll be able to dine to your heart's content.

Nevada is the only state where prostitution is legal and although it's home to two dozen licensed brothels, none are sci fi-themed... yet. Nevada businessman and documentary star Dennis Hof just bought a run-down brothel 90 miles from Las Vegas and is planning on turning it into his newest business venture: Alien Cathouse.

The brothel will feature girls from around the galaxy for men willing to pay. Hof’s interplanetary vision doesn’t end at the cathouse door, though. According to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, he is looking to transform not only the brothel, but the entire plot of land into an Area 51-themed tourist destination. Fun for the whole family — though perhaps not.

Hof is an expert in building buzzworthy brothels – his Moonlite Bunny Ranch is the setting for the HBO reality show called Cathouse — but when it comes to dreaming up sexy alien girls, he needs a little assistance. The Las Vegas Review-Journal explains that as Hof crafts his out-of-this-world bordello filled with girls from other planets, he is getting some help from one of earth’s experts, the infamous madam Heidi Fleiss. “She’s the chief alien design queen,” Hof told the paper.

The old friends are working together to plan the costumes and decor for the sci fi-themed brothel and are hoping to open their doors in a month. Start planning your intergalactic travel plans now, guys.

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A German website is offering its carnivorous customers the option of having their cows slaughtered in the field while they're grazing because it supposedly produces more delicious beef.

Visitors to the website www.mycow.de, based in the northeastern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania since 2010, have several options for ordering fresh beef. They can order steaks from specific farms and pick between a succulent Angus or delicious Galloway cow. They can also choose whether cows are killed traditionally in a slaughterhouse or in a field as they happy graze away their final moments.

Considered more humane, the field method also supposedly results in tastier beef because the cow isn't unduly stressed before its demise. Trips to the slaughterhouse can be enormously unpleasant for animals and their surging adrenaline is said to toughen up their meat.

Few farmers use the field-killing method because it’s more expensive and difficult. It necessitates someone quickly stunning and then shooting the cow, which then has to be rushed to a butcher. A 5 kilogram packet from www.mycow.de starts at about €75.

“This is a much more gentle slaughtering process,” Susanne Marx, the website's operator, told The Local, saying that the beef www.mycow.de sells comes from “happier cows.”

But Marx acknowledged that there is a limit to how much people want to know the specific cows they eat – this is why www.mycow.de doesn’t allow them to get to know or select specific cow for slaughter.

She also said there are a lot of variables that factor into how beef on someone's plate tastes.

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Cardiff Council is considering installing streetlights that show up skin blemishes which they hope will have youngsters fleeing with embarrassment

Deterrent: The council plans to turn teenagers' spotty skin against them
Getty.

A council has found a quirky way of tackling antisocial behaviour – acne.

Cardiff Council is planning to exploit spotty skin to deter teenagers from hanging around on the streets.

The local authority is considering installing streetlights that show up skin blemishes which they hope will have youngsters fleeing with embarrassment.

The scheme, thought to be the first of its kind in Wales, has been backed by South Wales Police.

But the concept was criticised by the National Youth Agency which said “anything that aims to embarrass people out of an area is not on”.

NYA development officer Peta Halls added: “Why waste limited resources on something which moves all young people out of an area?

“They will move on to somewhere else.”

Acne lights are the latest bizarre idea trialed by councils to combat antisocial behaviour.

In 2005, the Mosquito alarm was introduced to deter youths from loitering by emitting a high pitched noise audible only to people under 25.

Some shopping centres have also tried using soothing classical music to calm young people and prevent antisocial behaviour.

West Midlands Police saw a dramatic drop in the number of youths hanging around in public areas after piping Beethoven through the PA system, adding: “They clearly don’t like our choice of tunes”.

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A wallpaper that holds brick walls together during an earthquake has been welcomed as a major scientific breakthrough by Christchurch quake experts. The 'earthquake wallpaper' has been developed by German scientists to keep bricks and masonry from falling during violent shaking; giving people time to run to safety.

Professor Lothar Stempniewski, of the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology and who developed the technology for Bayer MaterialScience, said the wallpaper made walls more elastic and resistant to cracking. He said: "Our goal was to give people more time to get out safely into the open in the event of an earthquake.

"Even smaller earthquakes can cause dramatic damage, especially to masonry buildings. The degree of destruction depends less on the severity of the earthquake on the Richter scale than on how long the structures are shaken by the destructive energy from below the ground."

The special wallpaper design, which features fibres running in four directions, distributes energy evenly when walls are shaking, making them elastic and resistant to cracking. The seismic material was tested on a replica house in an earthquake simulator.

"Because of the earthquake wallpaper, we were unable to make the building collapse," researcher Mortiz Urban said. "In the New Zealand quake in early 2011, a great many walls crumbled and many houses collapsed completely as a result."

The scientist estimated that the wallpaper system could have prevented 60 to 70 per cent of the damage, adding: "Often it doesn't take much to prevent the collapse of a building." The wallpaper is pasted on using an adhesive with polyurethane beads.

Stefano Pampanin, associate professor in structural design and earthquake engineering at Canterbury University, welcomed the technology, saying it was also being developed in New Zealand.

He said: "It's a good thing. Fibre reinforced polymers (FRP) has been developed quite significantly over the last decade for the retrofit of existing reinforced concrete or masonry buildings.

"Across the world there is an increasingly emphasis on using this sort of new technology. Here in Canterbury we have been testing FRP products and have found that they are a feasible solution for retrofitting buildings, as they are not too invasive."

He said "many lives" could have been saved in Christchurch if this technology had been in place.

The quake wallpaper is expected to go on the commercial market later this year.

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Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, has applied for a patent on a mobile phone safety feature that would deploy an airbag if the device falls.

According to the patent filing, which was submitted in February 2011, but has only just been made public, tiny airbags would be deployed from the phone if the in-built accelerometer detected that was falling.
 
The patent submitted by the Amazon boss also suggests using a laser or even radar to determine the distance between the phone and the ground.
 
Other suggestions for protecting a falling phone include springs that would be released from the casing to ensure that the phone safely bounced on hitting the ground. The patent application also suggests that a gyroscope or jets of compressed air could be used to alter the angle of the device in the air.

 
The application describes a method for “determining if a risk of damage to the portable device from the impact exceeds a damage threshold; when the risk of damage to the portable device exceeds the damage threshold: altering the orientation of the portable device such that the air bag first impacts the surface; and deploying the airbag prior to impact with the surface.”
 
The invention is credited to Mr Bezos and Amazon vice president Greg Heart but the patent has not yet been granted. Mr Bezos, 47, started Amazon in 1994.

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You may think that the only thing separating some of your friends from monkeys is their ability to at least read. Time for a rethink: new research shows that baboons are capable of learning how to tell the difference between real and fictional English words.

A study carried out by Jonathan Grainger from Aix-Marseille University, France, shows that baboons can read. They can, for instance, identify that "wasp" is an English word, while "telk" is not. Of course, it doesn't follow that these words actually mean anything to them, but it does suggest that their ability stretches beyond purely recognizing shapes. In fact, it demonstrates that the animals have a capacity for orthographic processing essentially, the mental ability to unite letters into words.

Grainger trained the baboons to recognize English words, and also to tell them apart from similar, but nonsensical, words. They picked it up quickly, according to the research published in Science, and became able to categorize words they'd never even seen before with 75 per cent accuracy. It's worth pointing out that the fake words weren't randomly generated: instead of a string of characters like "gsfn", words were chosen to look similar to real words, like "dran" or "virt", making the process much more challenging.

Stanislas Deheane, an expert in the science of reading, told Not Exactly Rocket Science that "it fits very nicely with my own research, which suggests that reading relies, in part, on learning the purely visual statistics of letters and their combinations." Indeed, the researchers speculate that this is a skill hard-wired into the brain of the animals and were probably evident long before any human even thought of scrawling a word.

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