Growing up, Phoenix-based Austin Coulson was always fascinated by all the cool automotive records he found in the yearly Guinness Book of Records, and dreamed of one day having his name mentioned in the famous publication. He recently got his wish, after building the world’s smallest roadworthy car.

29-year-old Austin Coulson says he developed a passion for tinkering with mechanical stuff very early in life. As a young boy, he used to  ride bicycles with his friends, and always fond some parts to add or remove. When he turned 16. Austin bought his first car, a Bronco with a blown transmission. So he bought a repair manual and learned from scratch how take the thing apart and put it back together. It wasn’t easy, but he got the hang of it and he’s been building custom cars ever since. Two years ago, he saw a small go-kart with a car body on it, that made it look like a real miniature roadworthy vehicle. It got him thinking whether someone could really build such a small car and make it street legal. It also reminded Austin about his life-long dream of having his name in the Guinness Book of Records, so he started searching to see if there was already a record for the world’s smallest street-legal car. A guy from England held the record, but after seeing his creation, Coulson thought to himself “I can beat that”.

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30-year-old John Edward Doyle has the ability to squeeze his eyes out by up to 12 millimeters. He discovered his “talent” about two years ago while entertaining his friends, and for the past six months he has been using it to freak people out online under the alias “Mr. Zoom”.

John discovered his bizarre eye-popping ability while entertaining his friends at the local pub, in Rainhill, England, but he never dreamed it would one day make him an internet sensation. At one point he just decided to record himself pooping his eyes out to the popular Harlem Shake and upload the video on YouTube. He got a bigger reaction than he ever hoped, and soon he was getting emails, phone calls and TV show invitations. Mr. Zoom was on to something, so he kept doing it, each time choosing a popular song to squeeze his eyes out to. Six months after he started uploading his freaky act on YouTube, he has close to 600,000 views, he has been contacted by Ripley’s Believe It or Not and has flown to Japan and the US to appear on TV. It’s been a crazy ride, and with the media coverage he is getting these days, it’s far from over.

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English artist Giles Oldershaw has a very unique talent. He can take discarded pieces of cardboard, the kind pizza boxes are made of, and turn them into amazing portraits of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe or Marlon Brando using only the cardboard’s layers to highlight their features.

58-year-old Giles Oldershaw is not the world’s first artist to choose cardboard as his favorite medium. Renowned artist Chris Gilmour has been building detailed cardboard landscapes for years, and Scott Fife’s realistic cardboard busts have won him international acclaim, but Giles sets himself apart through his unique creative process. He begins by drawing the outlines of his portraits on a piece of cardboard with a pencil, then uses an assortment of tools like tweezers, scalpels and scissors to remove certain layers of corrugation, card and protective coating to give his artworks more depth. The actor-turned-artist says no ink, paint or charcoal of any kind is used to highlight the facial features of his subjects. From a distance, Oldershaw’s portraits resemble sepia paintings, but on closer inspection, the images reveal the high level of technical skill involved in their creation.

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Lisa Dickinson, owner of Manchester florist Venus Flowers, and her team of four florists spent over a week planning and working on a magnificent dress made entirely of flowers. The blooming gown was worn by Boss Model Eleanor Davies during the opening of  this year’s Dig the City festival.

We’ve featured a variety of unique garments in the past, from the prom dress made of homework to the fur coat made of chest hair, but few of them were as lovely as the flower dress created by Lisa Dickinson. When the organizers of  Dig the City, Manchester’s urban gardening festival, asked her to create the unique garment, Lisa admits she felt the task daunting, but once she started planning it became fun. “The challenge was to keep the dress looking fresh for as long as possible, the trick to making the dress endure was to use flowers that wouldn’t wither and die after a few hours, so I made the full skirt of the dress out of wax flowers—which is a really tough shrub—but with delicate sprays of flower heads,” the talented florist explains.

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Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant who can perform mind-boggling mathematical calculations and learn foreign languages in a matter of days. He speaks ten different languages, including Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh, and Icelandic and even made up his own. It’s safe to say he has one of the most extraordinary minds on Earth.

Daniel Tammet was born on January 31 1979, in East London, England. As a young child, Daniel banged his head against the wall and cried constantly. Nobody really knew what was wrong with him, and all doctors could say was that he was understimulated. Then, one day, while playing with his brother, Daniel had an epileptic seizure. He started taking medication and had to go to the hospital every month for blood tests. It was a troubling time for his parents, as one of Daniel’s grandfather suffered from epilepsy and eventually died from it, and they were thinking their son could suffer the same fate. Luckily, the medication worked and he eventually overcame his condition. It was during his childhood that Daniel and his family discovered his brain was different. One day, his brother asked him to multiply a long series of numbers in his head, as a joke, but the boy just closed his eyes, and after five or ten seconds the right answer came out of his mouth. His brother asked him several other questions and his answers were always right. His parents witnessed the whole thing, but they didn’t make a big deal out of it and never pressured him to work his magic in front of other people. They knew he was different, but they wanted him to have a normal life.

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German entrepreneur Reitner Reuther has made headlines in the national media for offering a very unique service. He gives parents who suspect their children of using illegal substances the chance to find out for sure by hiring a trained sniffer dog.

Statistics show drug abuse among youth is an increasing problem all around the world, but parents in Germany now have a new way of dealing with it without involving the authorities. Reitner Reuther believes his sniffer dog Thor is able to find even the most secret stashes of narcotics that can often be “too sophisticated” for parents to discover, so he set up a website where he offers to conduct discreet searches at the clients’ homes, at a rate of €95 ($125) per case. Thor completed his training to become a police dog in Texas, USA and specializes in sniffing out cannabis, heroin, speed and ecstasy. Parents get in touch with Reitner and they set up an appointment. When their child is away at school, he brings the dog by to search the house. According to his owner, no matter how well the drugs are hidden, nothing gets by Thor.

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Sean Le Vegan, a dog lover from Manchester, England, will spend over a month in an animal shelter enclosure  to raise awareness about the plight of stray dogs and encourage people to adopt rather than buy canine pets.

Sean, a 35-year-old web-designer and volunteer at the Manchester and Cheshire Dogs’ Home, believes spending 35 days and nights in a cage is a good way to attract attention to the hideous plight of homeless dogs. It’s also a great way to raise some much-needed funds for the dog shelter, as he plans to broadcast his challenge on the internet with webcams and charge £5 ($7.50) per subscription. People will be able to watch a human living a dog’s life and Le Vagan plans to offer them a realistic experience. 35 days is the average stay for a dog at the Manchester-based animal shelter. Just like the canines brought here, Sean won’t eat anything for the first four days and will have to make do with just water and a blanket. After that he will be feasting on vegetarian dog food throughout the whole event. He will only be allowed one hour of freedom per day, to use the toilet and freshen up. To make his experience even more authentic, he even had a chip implanted in his shoulder which  is hooked up to the dog-care database.

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For obvious reasons, most people wouldn’t even attempt to break a baseball bat with a shin kick, but Dr. Mak Yuree owes his superhuman reputation to his ability to break through three baseball bats with his thunder kicks.

Hailing from Dakha, Bangladesh, Mak Yuree is a world renown martial arts expert who has spent almost his entire life training in 40 different fighting styles, including Varma Kalai, one of the oldest and deadliest forms of pressure point martial art. He is also an international authority on meditation, mind training and motivational speaking, but most average people know him as the guy who can break baseball bats with his tibia. Yuree has set a world record for most wooden baseball bats broken with a single kick, after shattering three of them in one go, and has since then performed the amazing feat at a number of events and on television. Growing up under iron discipline in military boarding school, Thundershin Man says he trained for nearly 20 years by kicking tree trunks with rope rolled over them.

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The 50-acre expanse of Brimham Moor in North Yorkshire, England is home to a number of curious rock formations shaped by tens of thousands of years of erosion, but the most impressive of all is Idol Rock, a 200-ton monolith balancing on a tiny pyramidal base.

The 15-foot high Idol Rock looks like it’s about to crumble, but it never does. Weighing an estimated 200 tons, the giant rock formation has been performing its amazing balancing act for as long as anyone can remember, defying the laws of physics and leaving the visitors of Brimham Moor scratching their heads in awe. Also known as The Druids Idol or The Druid’s Writing Desk, this unique attraction sits on a tiny lump of rock only one foot in circumference. Photos of it have been circulating on the internet for years, with many claiming it is just the result of Photoshop manipulation, but the Idol of Brimham is very real, an example of Mother Nature’s artistic talent.

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Chloe Mayo, an amateur artist from Surrey, England, painted a depiction of her dream man two months before meeting him on an online dating site. She was so shocked by the resemblance that she hid the painting for fear he would think she was a stalker.

In 2009, Chloe, who was single at the time, painted a romantic image of her holding hands with a tall, dark, bearded man. The 31-year-old didn’t think too highly of her artwork, so she just left it in a corner of her living-room and forgot all about it. Shortly after, she started looking for love on the internet, and ended up messaging Michael Goeman. The pair seemed to have a lot in common, and after two months of chatting, they decided to meet in person. The moment she laid eyes on him, Chloe was shocked by his resemblance to the man in the painting. Fraid he might think she was some kind of stalker, she put the hid the painting under the bed and only showed it to Michael after they went on a few more dates. “He was due to come over to my house and I thought that if he saw the picture he would think I was a stalker and a bit weird, so I hid it under my bed,” Chloe said. “About a week later I mustered up the courage to show him and although he looked a bit confused, he saw the funny side when I explained what had happened.”

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There are a lot of shipwrecks in Sydney’s Homebush Bay, near the Olympic village, but none quite like the SS Ayrfield, also known as “The Floating Forest” for the lush mangrove vegetation that now covers its rusty hull.

The SS Ayrfield (originally launched as SS Corrimal), was a collier ship built in England in 1911 and used by the Commonwealth Government during World War II to transport supplies to American troops in the Pacific. It was sold in 1950 and operated as a collier on the sixty-miler run between Newcastle and Sydney, until 1972 when the ship’s registration was canceled and it was sent to its final resting place, Homebush Bay. Before the 2000 Olympic Games, this place was a ship breaking zone, and the dozens of shipwrecks that still remain here are a constant reminder of its history. Some say there’s a certain creepiness about the Homebush Bay ship graveyard, but that is lessened by the unique look of the SS Ayrfield, which locals often refer to as the Floating Forest. A bunch of full-grown mangrove trees now call this rusty partly-submerged piece of metal home, creating a new and unique attraction that draws in photographers from all over the world.

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Georgi Readman, an 18-year-old teenager from the Island of Wight, England survives only on cheap instant noodles, because she is afraid to eat other foods. The young hairdressing student goes through about 30 miles of noodles every year.

Georgi Readman got hooked on instant noodles when she was just five years old, after watching her older brother eat them, but they became her only source of nutrition after suffering a case of severe food poisoning at age eight. From that point on she couldn’t bring herself to eat any fruits or vegetables, and only occasionally diversified her diet with small bits of potatoes and chicken. Whenever she goes out shopping, Georgi’s mom always stocks up on 11p (¢16) packs of M Savers chicken noodles, because that’s the only brand she’s sure her daughter will eat. Any other kind of noodles might have green bits in them, so she would have to sieve them first. “I always fancy noodles and could easily eat two packets at once. I’ve even eaten them dry and uncooked before,” Readman says. She has always been a fussy eater, but ever since her food poisoning as a child, Georgi claims she goes into a panic, sweats and starts heaving whenever she tries to swallow any fruits or vegetables.

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72-year-old Arthur Boyt from Bodmin Moor, England is an unusual man who eats unusual food. His preference in meat leans towards roadkill – the dead animals that lie on the side of highways after being hit by speeding vehicles. This has earned him a bad reputation, but he just considers it a waste to eat anything else.

Over the years, Boyt has taken on the fancy title of ‘Roadkill Connoisseur’. “I am often asked how did this all begin,” he says in an interview. “After 1976, when I was living on my own, I didn’t have to bother with anybody else’s feelings in the matter. The food was there to be bought home and eaten. I would pick up roadkill in those days to bring home, I’m a taxidermist, I skin things and stuff them. And instead of throwing the body away, I decided to start eating them. I think that’s how it came about.” Boyt isn’t queasy about eating a lot of things, including Polecats, whose meat he says has a vile stink. But he’s figured out a way to get rid of the nasty smell – just place the meat under running water for four days, and it’s good to eat for him. He’s eaten badgers and once even a swan, which “tasted like mud.” One of his favorites is Labrador. “It has a pleasant taste and flavor that is a bit like lamb. It turns people off when I say that Labrador is my favorite thing to eat but the point is, I would never kill an animal.” True enough, Boyt is not a wasteful person by nature. “I don’t believe in waste,” he says. “I’m a freegan, I try to eat all my meals for free.” Read More »

Jason Barber, a farmer from Dorset, England, has spent three years creating the world’s first milk vodka. Now, his Black Cow label is the poison of choice for celebrities like Elizabeth Hurley and James Bond star Daniel Craig.

47-year-old Jason Barber, a sixth generation farmer, got the idea for his pure cow milk vodka after watching a TV documentary on Tuva, a small Siberian republic where people make vodka from yak milk. Intrigued by the idea, he set out to make his own, from the milk of the 250 cows on his farm in Beaminster, Dorset. It took him three long years to perfect the process, but the final result is nothing short of impressive, according to food and drink experts. Barber starts out by separating the milk into curds and whey. He uses the former to make cheese, while the latter is fermented into beer, using special yeast, to convert the sugar into alcohol. After being distilled, the milk beer goes through a special blending process. The resulting vodka is triple-filtered and hand-bottled. Made from fresh whole milk Black Cow vodka is apparently an exceptionally smooth drink with a distinct creamy character.

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It’s called the Saltdean Sizzler, and according to recent tests performed by the Warwick University, it’s three times hotter than the world’s strongest chili and even police pepper spray. That makes it the spiciest pizza on Earth.

The world’s hottest pizza was created by Paul Brayshaw, of Paul’s Pizza, in Saltdean, England, a self-confessed spicy food fanatic and fan of the Man vs Food TV show. After opening his own pizza place, Paul decided to include a challenge on the menu, and stared working on the hottest pizza he could make. He used one of the strongest chilies on the planet – the ghost chili – and spiced it up even more with a special chili paste with chili extract. The 32-year-old father of two says the Saltdean Sizzler starts out as a regular pizza, with a homemade dough base, regular Italian tomato and herb sauce and fresh mozzarella, but turns into a world of pain after he adds his killer sauce. Apparently it even changes from a nice “red tomato color” to an “evil black/red”. Ever since he put it on the menu last year, Paul has sold over 1,300 Saltdean Sizzlers, but only eight men and one woman have managed to eat all six slices of the 10-inch pizza. That’s just 0.1% of challengers.

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