Person in unicorn costume tries to rob a store

Apparently not all unicorns are the embodiment of purity and grace. Baltimore County Police say a person dressed in a unicorn costume and wielding a crowbar tried to rob a convenience store Saturday morning in the Baldwin community. Officers arrived just after the High’s store opening time of 5 am to respond to the robbery call.

Police say the suspect had fled in a silver car. They located what appeared to be the same car after it had wrecked. No other cars were involved in the wreck.

Police say two people involved in the crash were taken to a hospital, and detectives are working to determine what their involvement was in the robbery. No charges were immediately filed. Police didn’t say if money or merchandise was taken in the robbery.

Drunk passenger demands high-speed train slow down

German police say a drunken man with a fire extinguisher smashed his way into the driver’s cab of a high-speed train running from Frankfurt to Paris and demanded that the driver slow down. Federal police said the ICE train operated by Germany’s Deutsche Bahn stopped near Frankfurt after the incident Sunday morning. The 30-year-old man from Heideberg, who wasn’t identified, was arrested and faces an investigation into dangerous interference in rail traffic, among other things.

Police say passengers said the man took a fire extinguisher off the wall, smashed a glass door separating the cab from the passenger compartment, and told the shocked driver the train was going much too fast and he had to save the passengers. No passengers were hurt but the train was taken out of service.

man finds iguana in toilet, calls 911

A Florida man called 911 after going to the bathroom and finding a bright green iguana swimming in his toilet. Fort Lauderdale Battalion Chief Stephan Gollan tells the Miami Herald the man “freaked out and didn’t know what to do.” He says firefighter Jeff Kurus put on a sterile glove, reached in and grabbed the iguana. He took it outside and released it into the wild. Gollan says the department “is the end-all-be-all” when it comes to unique calls. The department tweeted pictures of the iguana, adding “can you imagine lifting the toilet lid and finding this?”

Hip hop best bet for a cheese that will please: Swiss study

Exposing cheese to round-the-clock music could give it more flavor and hip hop might be better than Mozart, Swiss researchers said on Thursday. Nine wheels of Emmental cheese weighing 10 kilos each were placed in separate wooden crates last September to test the impact of music on flavor and aroma. The cheese was exposed 24 hours a day to A Tribe Called Quest’s hip hop track “We Got it From Here”, Mozart’s ‘Magic Flute’ opera or Led Zeppelin’s rock classic “Stairway to Heaven”. One wheel was played the throbbing techno of Vril’s “UV” and another Yello’s dark ambient piece “Monolith”.

Soundwaves at low, medium and high frequencies were played for three others while one wheel was left in peace. “The most obvious differences were observed in strength of flavor, smell and taste,” Bern University of Arts researchers said in reporting the findings of a culinary jury which did blind tasting. “The hip hop sample topped the list of all cheese exposed to music in terms of fruitiness...(it) was the strongest of these in terms of smell and taste.”

Benjamin Luzuy, a Swiss TV chief and jury member, told Reuters TV: “The differences were very clear, in term of texture, taste, the appearance, there was really something very different.” The experiment, instead of using loudspeakers, used mini transmitters to conduct the energy of the music into the cheese. “All the energy is directly resonating inside of the cheese,” Michael Harenberg of Bern University of Arts told Reuters. Beat Wampfler, the cheesemaker behind the project, said the cheeses were tested twice by the jury and both times the results were more or less the same. He said the experiment would now focus on hip hop. “The idea is now to take 5 or 10 cheeses and put hip hop on them and then compare.”

now, ‘zombie lights’ for mobile-obsessed walkers

Tel Aviv has taken a small step toward protecting the lives of “smartphone zombies.” The municipality has installed special LED sidewalk lights at a busy crosswalk to alert distracted pedestrians staring at their phones when they can walk and when they should stop. Tomer Dror, head of the traffic management division at the Tel Aviv-Yafo Municipality, said the “zombie traffic lights” aim to minimize accidents between vehicles and inattentive pedestrians at crosswalks. “We cannot force them to take their eyes out of the smartphone and into the road. We need to find ways to put the road into their eyes,” he said. The striped lights turn green when it is safe to walk, and red when pedestrians should halt. For now, the pilot program is limited to a single intersection in central Tel Aviv, but the municipality says it will expand the zombie lights if they prove effective. Similar systems have already been used in Australia, Singapore and the Netherlands. So far, smartphone-addicted residents seem to be welcoming the lights.

“It’s something amazing,” said Tel Aviv resident Shai Levi. “As someone who is addicted to his phone and is all day long with his head glued on the screen, I think that it can without any hesitation, reduce the number of accidents.”