Icelandic man gets naked next to erupting volcano, and more of this week's weirdest news

7-Eleven wants to get in on the growing popularity of fast food drive-thrus. So it's opening one for its taco restaurant.

The convenience store chain said Tuesday that it is opening a Laredo Taco location with a drive-thru in Dallas. Typically, Laredo Taco locations can be found in 7-Eleven stores themselves. This is the first drive-thru for the taco chain, as well as the first drive-thru at a corporate-owned 7-Eleven store. Customers can order Slurpees in addition to items from the Laredo Taco menu, which include an assortment of tacos, side dishes and aguas frescas.

During the pandemic, drive-thrus have emerged as a key way for fast-food restaurants to sell to customers. Chains that have relied on them for years, like Taco Bell, McDonald's and Burger King, are unveiling innovative new concepts designed to get more customers through faster. Others, like Chipotle and Shake Shack, are rapidly adding drive-thru locations or opening them for the first time.

"Customers looking for socially distanced ways to grab breakfast, lunch and dinner will really appreciate [the drive-thru] now," said Chris Tanco, 7-Eleven's chief operating officer, in a statement.

The new drive-thru is attached to one of 7-Eleven's Evolution stores, where the chain debuts new beverages and offers unique flavors. Customers who go inside will find self-serve specialty coffee, freshly baked pastries and a selection of wine and craft beers, as well as mobile checkout for rewards program users.

Over the past several years, 7-Eleven has gotten more serious about its culinary offerings. It has launched private-label meal kits and tested keto and paleo snacks. It acquired Laredo Taco locations in its 2018 deal with Sunoco.

— CNN Business's Nathaniel Meyersohn and Rachel Metz contributed to this report.

Stripping off a few layers when things heat up can often be the most natural thing in the world.

Few of us, however, would attempt it in front of a crowd of hundreds while stood in front of a volcano spewing lava.

But adventure tour guide Sveinn Snorri Sighvatsson has gone viral for doing just that during a visit to Geldingadalur in Iceland's Reykjanes peninsula.

His impromptu striptease took place as revelers gathered at the site of the erupting volcano to watch the remarkable display, which began last Friday.

Sighvatsson, who works for tour company I Am Iceland, was asked to model the Pit Viper shades as a favor and decided to take things up a gear to ensure maximum exposure.

"My friends and I were joking about naked pictures in the lava field," he tells CNN Travel. "One of my friends is a photographer and he was telling me about these sunglasses. So I said, 'get your camera ready, I'm going to take my clothes off.'"

The photographer who captured the moment was Norris Niman, who says he knew Sighvatsson was "the was the perfect man for a shot in the freshly formed lava field."

"A festival is not a true festival unless someone gets naked," adds Niman. "And this one was of course no exception."

Maximum exposure

But undertaking an off-the-cuff photoshoot beside an eruption site was no easy task, and is definitely not to be recommended. In fact, visitors have been instructed not to gather too near to the lava fountains.

"It was like standing too close to a big bonfire," adds Niman. "So we had about a minute to snap this collection while rotating around so as not to roast either side too much and with a big crowd watching."

While his experience as an adventure guide meant he was able to assess the danger and "get in and out" quickly, Sighvatsson stresses that anyone who "doesn't know what they're doing" should stay on upper ground and avoid going near the lava fields.

"People are not aware of the gasses that are there," he says. "It's ok to stay above it [the volcano] on the higher ground, there you are completely safe. But going down into it can be really, really dangerous.

"A heavy wind was blowing on Sunday, so the gasses went into the opposite direction and we were fine staying close to the lava field. But if there is no wind, you don't go down there."

Although the shoot took less than a few minutes, hundreds of people were there to witness it and the moment found it way onto the Internet.

'This eruption is something else'

Sighvatsson and Niman seem to be enjoying the attention brought about by their eruptive photoshoot, and while commentators haven't been focusing their attention on the sunglasses too much, their unnamed friend is pretty pleased with how things turned out as well.

"He actually sent a message saying that that was the picture he was waiting for," says Sighvatsson, who has been back to see the volcano a couple of times over the past few days.

"I have seen every eruption here on the island since 1991, but this is something else."

As crowds continued to gather at Geldingadalur, which is still spewing out lava, Icelandic authorities have set up a hiking trail to regulate the large numbers of visitors and the area is patrolled regularly in order to ensure everyone stays safe.

"It's a perfect tourist eruption," Thorvaldur Thordarson, volcanology professor at the University of Iceland, told Reuters earlier this week.

"With the caveat though, don't go too close."

It was one of the videos that went viral during 2020's first lockdown, cheering everyone up as they sat at home: a dolphin swimming close to the surface in what purported to be a Venetian canal.

It was fake of course -- it turned out to have been shot near the port in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia.

But on Monday, two dolphins really did make a day trip to Venice.

They took a trip up the famous Grand Canal, before swimming over to Giudecca island, where they saw no fewer than two churches by Renaissance starchitect Andrea Palladio, before returning home to the Adriatic Sea.

Their visit came when the city is in another lockdown as Italy battles a third wave of Covid-19.

And while they were in danger during their time in the city, it is believed the dolphins made it safely out.

The pair of striped dolphins -- thought to be an adult and a juvenile, probably a mother and child -- were first spotted around 6 a.m. by Marco Busetto, co-owner of drainage company Eredi Busetto Giuseppe, in the Giudecca Canal, a wide waterway separating the long island of Giudecca from the historic center of Venice. He alerted the authorities.

An hour later they appeared at the mouth of the Grand Canal, swimming up the iconic waterway towards the famous Salute church, where the Busetto team -- by now parked up to start work -- clocked them once more.

"It really was a lovely surprise -- something unique and special, to see them and to think how close they had got to the Grand Canal," Luca Folin, who works for the firm and shot a video which swiftly went viral, told CNN.

"But they were also in a lot of danger because of all the boats going back and forth, which could have injured them with their propellers." The group tried to halt traffic while waiting for the police to arrive.

The rescue mission

In the meantime, the authorities called in the experts -- a team from CERT, or Cetacean strandings Emergency Response Team, from the nearby University of Padua. They caught up with the dolphins back in the Giudecca Canal, between the churches of San Giorgio Maggiore and Zitelle, grand marble-clad churches designed by Palladio, which enjoy eye-popping views over the Basin of St Mark's, and St Mark's Square.

"The traffic was intense, and we realized the dolphins were completely disorientated, swimming around in all directions, mostly because they were scared," Guido Pietroluongo from the group told CNN.

"Dolphins mostly orientate themselves by sound, but here, both sides of the canal had walls and there were boats all around. The authorities said they had been stuck there for two hours, swimming round and round."

And so to the rescue. The CERT team -- led by professor Sandro Mazzariol -- coordinated nine boats of the Venice authorities into a chain, trying to steer the animals towards the Lido, Venice's long strip of beach, and a point where the Venetian lagoon meets the Adriatic Sea. It took two and a half hours.

"Time and time again a ferry would cut through the chain so the dolphins would get lost again," says Pietroluongo.

Eventually, with other traffic redirected, the "chain" worked, and the dolphins turned their backs on St Mark's Square, towards the Lido.

"We realized the animals were at the safest point and wanted to see what they would do," says Pietroluongo.

"We sighted them three times and then lost them completely. They hadn't gone back towards the Grand Canal, so hopefully they took the right direction."

It's believed they made it safely back to the Adriatic.

The CERT team were on alert to be called back Tuesday, but there have been no sightings.

"Hopefully they're free in their environment, now," he says.

A rare sighting

Striped dolphins -- as the CERT team believe them to be, having watched back the footage -- are a rare sighting in the northern Adriatic. Deepwater mammals, they are usually found in the Tyrrhenian and Ionian seas, and the southern half of the Adriatic, says Pietroluongo. What's more, they usually swim in pods of up to 100, not pairs, and stay far away from the coastline. The last time one was seen in the Venice lagoon was four years ago; bottlenose dolphins are seen more regularly.

The group think that this pair could have lost their way while looking for food. "They could have been following prey in the mid Adriatic, pushed north and suddenly found themselves in Venice," he says.

Or who knows -- maybe they, too, wanted a chance to see the empty, locked-down city that has done the rounds again on social media.

Pietroluongo calls the sighting "joyous." Meanwhile, Luca Folin, who shot the video of the creatures in the Grand Canal, called it a "beautiful and rare moment... at a sad time."

"I uploaded it to social media without thinking it'd go around the world," he says.

"To be honest, I posted it to give a nice greeting to my fellow citizens in such a sad year -- but having the video go viral is nice because it means I've made others smile."