Oddity Central

“Asskicker” Coffee Contains 80 Times More Caffeine Than Regular Brew, Comes with a Health Warning

Posted: 30 Aug 2016 12:18 PM PDT

Viscous Coffee, a café in Adelaide, Australia, sells a cup of super-coffee that contains five grams of caffeine – 80 times more than a normal cup of java and half the dose considered to be lethal. Called the “Asskicker”, the strong beverage comes with a health warning for people with heart problems and blood pressure issues.

A cup of espresso has about 60mg of caffeine, while a serving of standard filtered coffee has about 150mg of it, depending on how it is prepared. The Asskicker contains five full grams of caffeine, which Viscous Coffee owner Steve Benington says is enough to provide 12 to 18 hours of “sustained up-time”. But the high caffeine content means it shouldn’t be consumed in one go, but slowly, over a period of four hours.

Benington says he came up with the idea for the Asskicker when an emergency department nurse asked him for something that would keep her awake and alert for an unexpected night shift. “She consumed her drink over two days and it kept her up for almost three days — I toned it down a little after that and the Asskicker was born,” he recalls. Nowadays, the complex concoction is made with four espresso shots, four 48-hour brewed cold drip ice cubes, 120ml of 10-day brewed cold drip and is finished with four more 48-hour brewed cold drip ice cubes. "Each cold drip ice cube is approximately equivalent of a bit more than two shots of espresso in caffeine," Benington explains.

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Posted: 30 Aug 2016 10:25 AM PDT

The Norwegian Environment Agency has recently released a series of haunting images of at least 323 dead reindeer – 70 of them calves – killed in what has been described as one of the deadliest lightning strikes ever.

It is unclear exactly when the natural disaster occurred, but the hundreds of dead bodies were discovered on Friday by a group of hunters in a remote area of the barren Hardanangervidda plateau, in central Norway. Spanning some 8,000 square kilometers, Hardangervidda is the largest high mountain plateau in northern Europe and the largest national park in Norway, with a population of 10,000 to 11,000 wild reindeer.

While the specifics of the mass death will probably never be known, experts say that animals tend to huddle together in extreme weather, which makes it easier for lightning to pass through their bodies. Norwegian officials say that multiple animal deaths caused by lightning strike is not very uncommon, but the scale of this event is definitely unheard of. “We are not familiar with any previous happening on such a scale,” Kjartan Knutsen of the Norwegian Environment Agency said. “Individual animals do from time to time get killed by lightning, and there are incidents where sheep have been killed in groups of 10 or even 20, but we have never seen anything like this.”

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