It’s hard to believe, but the bag of potato chips you’re looking at right now isn’t real, it’s just an expertly drawn optical illusion.

Twitter user Shinoo (@ Shinoo_0215) has been getting a lot of attention this week thanks to his incredibly detailed color pencil drawings. Actually, calling his artworks “detailed” is a bit of an understatement, considering how life-like they look. Take the bag of potato chips bellow, if you didn’t know it was only a drawing, could you tell it apart from an actual, three-dimensional bag? Heck, I know it’s a drawing and I still can’t believe it.

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Known as La maison dans la Loire (the House in the Loire), the three-storey building looks like the victim of a flood that once swept it away, but appearances can be deceiving…

Walking along the river Loire, near the town of Lavau-sur-Loire, just a stone throw away from Nantes, you’re bound to spot a rather unusual sight – a tilted building located right in the middle of the river. You’d think it was brutally swept away by some catastrophic flood, but it was actually placed there deliberately by a company that specializes in salvaging wrecks, at the request of a French artist. Today, the House in the Loire is one of the highlights of river cruises on the Loire.

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A UK company has sparked controversy online for selling glass bottles filled with the “freshest coastal air” for up to $105 per bottle.

Coast Capture Air started bottling fresh air and selling it as a souvenir and a talking point about the importance of clean air in the modern era, but then people from polluted areas of the world reportedly started buying these bottles for practical purposes, inhaling the clean coastal air every day. They told the company that it helped counter the harmful effects of air pollution, so it kept selling it and even attached a price tag that seems staggering for what is essentially an empty glass bottle – £75 ($105).

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A talented art and design student recently stunned Japanese social media with his collection of delicious-looking sushi made exclusively of stone.

Hama, a student of the Joshibi University of Art and Design, in Kanagawa, Japan, has been exhibiting his stunning stone sushi at various universities across his country, to great success. And it’s easy to see why; his work is absolutely amazing, with some bite-sized pieces looking so realistic that you can hardly tell them apart from the real thing.

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A Chinese man who spent a small fortune as well as a lot of time and effort turning a small wasteland into a pink paradise in order to impress his ex-girlfriend, has received a clot of compassion online, after failing to win back his old fling.

It’s fair to say that Xiao Xu, a young man from Hetou Village, in China’s Guangdong province, went above an beyond to win back the heart of his ex-girlfriend. Over the course of a month, he spent around 100,000 yuan ($15,500) turning a small patch of wasteland rising up from a lake near his village into a fairytale Love Island complete with fake cherry blossom trees, swings, river rock arrangements, and more. He even convinced some locals to give him a hand and turn this place into the ultimate love letter to his former partner. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out the way he had hoped…

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The Diomedes, two small islands in the Bearing Sea are famous as one of the few places where you can travel back in time, sort of…

The international date line is an imaginary line that runs through the middle of the Pacific Ocean, marking the difference between calendar dates. Crossing the line from east to west, you would need to set your clock forward by a day, while crossing from west to east, you would set it back by a day. The international dateline runs from the North to the South pole, but it isn’t straight; instead it zig-zags, taking into account various political borders. It just so happens to pass right between the Diomedes Islands, in the Bering Sea, making it possible to (sort of) travel through time just by traversing a distance of only 2.4 miles (3.8 km).

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If you’re the kind of person who uses pencils often, you know how pesky those eraser shavings can get after a while. But what if you could put them all o good use, sort of?

Japanese media recently showcased the story of a Chinese teenager who has been saving all his eraser shavings since he was in first grade. Guang Ying originally appeared on TV five years ago, when he was in sixth grade and had already been saving all of his eraser shavings for five years. At the time, he had already created a round mass of shavings the size of a baseball, which was pretty impressive, albeit somewhat gross. But it was nothing compared to how it looks today…

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The world is full of pampered pets, but while some depend on their owners wealth, a lucky few have their own fortunes. And no animal is as wealthy as Gunther IV, a beautiful German shepherd and member of the world’s richest dog dynasty.

It’s hard to imagine any animal being the beneficiary of a fortune of nearly $400 million, but such a lucky pet actually exists. Gunther IV, a descendant of Gunther II, the original world’s wealthiest animal, is worth a reported $375 million. He lives in a multi-million-dollar mansion in Miami, has a full staff looking after him, included his own maid and butler, spends his days playing and swimming, and eats only the finest food money can buy, including caviar and truffles. Gunther also has his own corporation, whose employees manage his assets and make sure the dynasty’s fortune keeps growing.

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A 26-year-old Vietnamese man claims to have radically changed his appearance with the help of plastic surgery, after being laughed at during a job interview, because of his looks.

TikTok user Đỗ Quyền has been getting a lot of attention on Asian social media, after posting photos of what he claims is his former self before undergoing nine plastic surgery procedures. Looking at the difference in appearance, it’s easy why people are shocked; the guy looks like a completely different person, from the shape of his face, to his eyes and nose. He claims that he turned to plastic surgery after trying to get a job and being laughed at by the interviewer, because of his unattractive looks.

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The marbled crayfish or marmokreb, a mutant species that didn’t exist 25 years ago, is considered one of the most invasive freshwater creatures in the world, and it’s all due to its remarkable capacity to clone itself.

The rise of the the marbled crayfish as an internationally recognized invasive species can be traced back to the mid 1990s, when German aquarium hobbyist whom experts prefer not to identify, for privacy reasons, bought a large crayfish described to him as a “Texas crayfish”. The man was immediately stunned by its size and the enormous batches of eggs it could lay. He started bragging about it to his friends, and giving away specimens. Marmokreb-mania was in its infant stages, but as marbled crayfish started appearing in pet shops, aquarium hobbyists started noticing something peculiar…

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A 32-year-old man nicknamed “Mr. McDonald’s” has been eating at the world’s most popular fast food chain every other day for the past two decades, and has invested a small fortune in McDonald’s-related clothes and memorabilia.

David Geyer, a gardener from Bergheim, Germany, first ate at a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in 1997, and the moment he took a bite of that very first burger, he knew that the iconic fast food brand would become a part of his life forever. He came back for more every chance he got, but he realized just how passionate he was about McDonald’s when he got his first job and started spending more time at the local McD’s than he did at his mother’s dining table. His love for the fast food chain has since transcended food, as he has since gotten permanent McDonald’s tattoos and invested in burger-themed clothing and memorabilia as well.

An Australian woman recently took to Facebook to share photos of a giant moth she stumbled across in outside of Brisbane.

Pam Taylor posted the first photos of the frighteningly large insect on the Amateur Entomology Australia group, on February 23. The pics showed a huge grey moth clinging to a tree branch. To show just how large the moth really was, the woman also photographed it next to her open palm. Obviously, the photos got a lot of attention from the other amateur entomologists, many of whom recognized the insect as a specimen of Endoxyla Cinereus, or the Giant Wood Moth.

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An impressive trompe-l-oeil fresco painted in the coastal city of Boulogne-Sur-Mer was recently crowned France’s most beautiful street artwork for 2020.

Every year, a popular French portal dedicated to urban art hosts a national competition to crown the nation’s most impressive street art. Thousands of votes are cast, and for last year, the title went to an amazing artwork created by Spanish street artist Gonzalo Borondo, on the city’s rue Jules Baudelocque, last summer. From the right angle, it looks like an elaborate metal gate, with detailed bas-reliefs on either side, but a closer look reveals it to be just an optical illusion.

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In a landmark divorce ruling, a Chinese court ordered a man to pay thousands of dollars to his ex-wife, as compensation for housework performed during their five-year marriage.

According to court papers, the man, identified only as Chen, filed from divorce from his wife, Wang, last year, after a five-year marriage. Although reluctant to grant him the divorce at first, the woman later requested that he compensate her for all the work she did as a full-time housewife during their marriage, adding that he had not participated in raising their child and “barely cared about or participated in any kind of domestic chores”. Recently, a Beijing family court ruled in the woman’s favor, sparking a heated debate in China.

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If you’ve ever used a pencil, you know how brittle and delicate the pencil lead is. Somehow, Japanese artist Shiroi is able to carve that fragile material into stunningly detailed micro-artworks.

Mr. Shiroi (@shir0003) took up pencil lead carving seven years ago, after watching a segment on renowned Japanese pencil carver Toshiyuki Yamazaki on TV. He was blown away by the level of detail the master lead carver could achieve, and decided to give it a try for himself. As you can imagine, simply keeping his hand steady enough to keep from breaking the fragile lead was a huge challenge in the beginning, but he kept at it. Today, Shiroi is a pencil lead carving master in his own right.

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