Latvian artist Marite Desaine specializes in beautiful ballpoint pen drawings that can easily be mistaken for elaborate paintings.

In the right hands, the humble ballpoint pen can be an amazing art tool, and we have featured some pretty amazing ballpoint drawings in the past, but nothing quite like the artworks of Marite Desaine. The Latvian artist first took the internet by storm with her awe-inspiring drawings back in 2014, soon after graduating from art school, when a number of prestigious art websites and blogs picked up her work. And for good reason, her style was unique, and the artworks – mostly landscapes – looked more like colorful paintings than drawings.

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AI is everywhere these days, and the humble baby stroller industry is no exception. Canadian stroller maker Glüxkind is set to release the world’s most advanced AI-powered baby stroller.

Originally unveiled at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the Glüxkind Ella is a technological wonder compared to most other baby strollers. Calling it a stroller sounds a bit unfair, considering that it’s more of a high-tech many that can independently rock your baby to sleep, assist the user on uphill and downhill slopes, and constantly monitor surroundings via an array of sensors and cameras, among many other impressive functions. It may look like a regular stroller at first sight, but Ella is actually a small battery-powered vehicle powered by artificial intelligence.

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A Taiwanese student recently made news headlines for a clever art project involving a racy billboard that wasn’t exactly what it looked like.

Facebook has a very strict policy when it comes to nudity, but this policy is often poorly enforced. For example, photos showing female nipples are considered nudity and are almost instantly removed by the Facebook algorithm. However, the tool is far from perfect, and it has a tough time distinguishing between male and female nipples, especially in the case of androgynous men. This was the case with Wu, a slender, long-haired art student from Shezi, village, in Tainan, who recently had an artistic picture removed from Facebook for indecent exposure. The experience gave him an idea…

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A Tennessee romance book writer whose own daughter announced her tragic death to friends and fans two years ago recently announced that she is coming back to writing, and everyone is really confused.

In September 2020, friends and colleagues of Susan Meachen, a self-published romance fiction writer, were shocked to hear that she had taken her own life due to online bullying. Someone claiming to be her daughter announced the devastating news on Facebook, and tributes from fans and authors who had known and worked with her started pouring in. For the next couple of years, Meachen’s Facebook profile was seemingly used by her family to post tributes to the author and inspirational stuff, as well as to promote her books. Some claim to have bought her work as a way to support her grieving family. But a couple of days ago, something weird happened – someone claiming to be Susan Meachen took to Facebook to announce that she wasn’t really dead, and that she was coming back to writing…

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An Indian man has been making news headlines for honoring his late wife’s wish to build a life-size statue of her so they can still be together.

Tapas Sandilya, a retired government employee from India’s West Bengal, lost his wife of 39 years in 2021, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Indrani was taken to the hospital while he was forced into isolation, so he couldn’t be by her side when she passed away. Determined to at least fulfill one of his wife’s final wishes, Tapas started looking for an artist that could create a lifelike silicone statue of Indrani, and spent 6 months and around $3,000 on the unusual project.

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Daisuke Samejima is a talented Japanese artist whose amazing spherical paintings look like the view through a fish-eye lens, regardless of the angle you see them from.

Painting a hyper-realistic rendition of an object, animal or human is difficult enough, but imagine doing it on a spherical canvas instead of a flat one. Apart from making sure that everything looks real to the untrained eye, the artist needs to consider the warping necessary to make everything look perfect regardless of what angle the sphere is viewed from. To be honest, photos just don’t do Daisuke’s art justice, so it’s a good thing we also have videos of them…

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The Columbia Basin Pigmy Rabbit is the smallest and perhaps the rarest rabbit breed in the world. It is native to just one part of the Washington State Area, and weighs under 500 grams.

There are plenty of tiny domestic rabbit breeds to choose from if you’re looking for an adorable pet rabbit, but the tiniest of them all is actually a wild breed that doesn’t make a great pet. The Columbia Basin Pigmy Rabbit is skittish and nervous, but the main reason why you’ll most likely never own one is its critically endangered status. The breed was declared extinct in the wild in 2001, when the last 14 specimens were scooped up from their native habitat and put into a captive breeding program.

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Chaco Chaco is a popular South Korean Youtuber whose claim to fame is the ability to reproduce popular songs on one or multiple musical calculators.

Calculators are handy when dealing with math, but one particular calculator is actually more popular as a musical instrument. The Egoelife AR-7778 and AR-8001 are designed as instruments and even come with instructions on how to use them as such. But, just like with any other musical instrument, you need talent and practice to produce music worth listening to, otherwise, you’re just using it as a cool toy. That’s what sets Chaco Chaco, a musical calculator artist with over 800,000 subscribers on YouTube alone, apart from pretty much any other musical calculator user.

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A South Carolina college professor is sounding the alarm on the use of advanced chatbots powered by artificial intelligence by students to complete various assignments.

Darren Hick, an assistant philosophy professor at Furman University, claims that one of his students used ChatGPT, an advanced AI-powered chatbot recently released by OpenAI and freely available to the public, to create a philosophy essay. While checking the essays turned in by his students, one caught his eye because of the unusual wording. It wasn’t grammatically incorrect, but it wasn’t language that a human college student would use. Hick compared it to the work “of a very smart 12th grader,” adding that the chatbot’s capacity to produce original works both terrorized and fascinated him.

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A Chinese man who recently bought 20 robot vacuums online for an unbelievable bargain price documented his experience to the delight of the internet.

The average price of a decent robot vacuum in China is around 1,000 yuan ($145), with more advanced models costing several times that much. So imagine finding a robot vacuum for just 27 yuan ($4) online! Can you blame this guy who bought 20 of them at once, just to make sure that their number compensates for performance only to learn the hard way that that’s not how these things work? As you can imagine, there was a reason those things cost next to nothing, but at least he got a good laugh and a lot of online attention out of it.

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What looked like a growing oil spill in Michigan’s Mackinac Straits area turned out to be a massive gathering of tens of thousands of ducks and other aquatic birds.

On December 21 of last year, the Mackinac Bridge Authority started receiving calls from concerned divers regarding a possible oil spill in the area. With each passing day, the number of calls regarding the oil spill kept growing, which makes sense, considering that the black mass that had formed on the water appeared to be growing. However, it wasn’t oil, but a record-setting gathering of Redhead ducks. In the beginning, authorities counted around 7,000 of them gathered together under and around Mackinac Bridge. Their number has grown since then, and there are now several tens of thousands of birds making up the “oil spill”.

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For about a year now, authorities in Salt Lake City have been trying to solve the mystery of a series of solar-powered antennas that keep popping up in the foothills around the city.

The first devices were discovered around a year ago. There was just a couple of them, but since then about a dozen have been reportedly located and disabled. According to the city’s recreational trails manager, the devices consist of a locked battery box, a solar panel, and an antenna. No one knows who keeps planting them and for what purpose, so for now all anyone can do is speculate and attempt to dismantle them, because they are installed on public land without a permit.

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A Welsh family has been living in the middle of a roundabout for over four decades, after refusing to leave as the circular road was built around them.

In 1960, when David John and Eirian Howatson moved into their bungalow in Denbighshire, Wales the area was just a regular neighborhood and things were pretty normal for about two decades, until authorities came knocking and let them know that their property was right where a new roundabout was to be built. The Howatsons refused to move away, so the roundabout was built around their home, and the family has been living there ever since.

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A 52-year-old “doctor” in Pakistan recently made news headlines for welcoming his 60th child and claiming he wants to have even more kids with his three wives.

Sardar Jan Mohammad Khan Khilji, a resident of Quetta, the Capital of Balochistan, has a very big family that he hopes to keep growing in the coming years. The Pakistani doctor, who runs his own clinic in the city, has three wives, and just welcomed his 60th child, a son he named Khushal. That’s a lot more than enough for most people, but Sardar said that he wants to take a new wife and continue having children.

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The Radar S-10000 measures 276 x 141 x 43 mm and weighs over 2.2 kilograms (5 pounds), making it one of the largest, if not the largest, commercially available erasers.

Japanese eraser maker Seed was founded in 1915, making it one of the oldest companies in the business. Its most popular product line, Radar, was launched in 1968 and quickly became a favorite in the Japanese market. The smooth texture and flawless erasing performance made the Radar a commercial success despite its premium price range of 20 – 50 yen, at a time when 10 yen erasers were the norm. The Radar line has been going strong ever since, with erasers of various shapes and sizes, including a gigantic 2,285-gram slab priced at an eye-watering 13,200 yen ($100).

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