Seattle-based Lauren Ko is a self-taught baker who rose to fame thanks to the mathematical precision of her pie designs, most of which are inspired by complex geometric patterns.

A former executive assistant in higher education, Lauren Ko got into baking completely by accident. She saw a picture of a really beautiful pie while surfing the internet and asked herself if she could do something like that. Little did she know that the seemingly unimportant self-challenge would change her life forever. After baking her first pie in 2016, Lauren never looked back, and soon after starting her Instagram in 2017, her mesmerizing pies were already a big hit on the popular social network. It wasn’t long before juggling her job and pie making got too difficult and she decided to focus her efforts exclusively on her passion.

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Introducing the electric toy car for the 1%. Luxury car maker Bugatti teamed up with London-based Little Car Company to create 500 miniature electric cars for kids, priced at a spicy $35,000 each.

The French car maker originally unveiled the children’s electric car, named Bugatti Baby II, at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show, and soon after announced that all planned 500 units had been sold to wealthy parents all over the world. But then the Covid-19 pandemic happened and suddenly some of the buyers decided that spending tens of thousands of dollars on what is essentially a children’s toy was ill-advised under the circumstances. So Bugatti had no choice but to announce that some Bugatti Baby II electric cars for kids are once again available for purchase. They start at $35,000, get them while they’re hot!

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Human pregnancies normally last around 9 months, but one Indonesian woman has been making news headlines in her country for claiming that she gave birth just one hour after experiencing pregnancy symptoms.

Heni Nuraeni, a 30-year-old woman from Mandalasari, a village in Indonesia’s Tasikmalaya Regency has become the main topic of conversation in her country, after it was revealed that she gave birth to a baby boy after allegedly experiencing pregnancy symptoms for about an hour. Heni claims that on Saturday night, July 18th, her belly started growing and she started experiencing painful cramps which she immediately associated with child birth, having previously given birth to two children. The problem was that not only had she been oblivious to the pregnancy, she also hadn’t made love to her husband in 19 months…

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Gyromitra esculenta, or the False Morel, is a Spring mushroom that contains the toxin and carcinogen gyromitrin, which makes it illegal to sell and cook in countries around the world. In Finland, however, it is considered a delicacy.

False Morel mushrooms have historically been consumed in northern Europe for centuries, but as chemistry and medicine evolved, it became somewhat of a forbidden fruit due to the dangers of consuming even small amounts of gyromitrin. Symptoms associated with the ingestion of this known toxin and carcinogen include severe headaches, vomiting, nausea, extreme dizziness, diarrhea and, if the damage to the liver is too serious, even death. Their sale in countries like Sweden and Norway was made illegal years ago, but in Finland people still eat it with gusto.

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An international team of researchers claim to have created the first synthetic cut-proof material that actively destroys the tool trying to cut through it.

Even the toughest lock can do little more than delay a person properly equipped to cut through them, but engineers at Durham University in England and the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have come up with a new material that they say is extremely hard to cut through. Called Proteus, the revolutionary synthetic material is inspired not by diamonds and sapphires, the toughest natural materials known to man, but by the cellular skin of the grapefruit and the fracture resistant shells of the abalone mollusk.

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From flamboyant wedding cakes shaped like fantasy castles, to edible optical illusions, we’ve featured some amazing cakes here on OC, but this collection of marine-themed treats definitely take the cake!

The Covid-19 pandemic has made vacationing in a tropical island paradise a lot harder this year, but you can satisfy your craving for tropical destinations as well as your sweet tooth with some ultra-realistic paradise island cakes. We didn’t even know something like that even existed, but it turns out some cake masters are so skilled that they can recreate a tropical island setting using regular baking ingredients, food coloring and jelly.

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Alexis Stone a makeup artist so skilled that he can virtually transform into anyone, including male and female celebrities, movie characters and historical figures.

Elliot Joseph Rentz, aka Alexis Stone, is a drag queen and online influencer from Manchester, UK who rose to fame for his talent of using makeup to transform into various pop icons, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Adele. Some of his impersonations are so good that most people think his photos are digitally altered, but the artist swears that it’s all in the makeup and the careful mimicking of stars’ facial expressions.

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It’s almost impossible to tell, but the man featured in the photos below doesn’t exist. He is a deepfake, a persona created by a computer algorythim. However, the articles this “journalist” published in several popular newspapers are very real, and a sign of things we can expect from a fast-evolving AI.

Oliver Taylor first got the attention of international news agency Reuters after being alerted about him by London Mazen Masri about an article Taylor had written about him and his wife, Palestinian rights campaigner Ryvka Barnard, in which they were described as “known terrorist sympathizers”. The couple were taken aback by the allegation, especially since it came from a a university student. But the more Masri looked at Taylor’s profile photo, the more convinced he was that something was off about him…

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India is one of the most affected countries by the Covid-19 pandemic, and people are turning to spiritual and divine powers in an attempt to protect themselves from the new coronavirus.

Last month, Indian media reported on a group of women from a village in West Bengal who had decided to fight the coronavirus in their own way – by worshiping Corona Mai, or ‘Corona Goddess’. They set up a small shrine on the banks of Chinnamasta pond, near Asansol city, and started singing songs and mantras, burning incense and bringing offerings like fruits, vegetables, ghee, and jaggery. The women said that they planned to worship and pray to the goddess until she takes away the coronavirus. That may take a while…

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Nguyen Thi Dinh, an 83-year-old woman from Vietnam’s Ben Tre Province, allegedly stopped cutting her hair when she was 19, which explains why it measures 6 meters in length and is shaped like a python.

Just a week after Indian man Doddapalliah made international news headlines with his 7.3-meter-long-hair, which he claimed he had never even trimmed, we feature the story of a Vietnamese pensioner who insists that she hasn’t cut or even shampooed her locks in the last 64 years. It all started when Nguyen Thi Dinh, from Binh Thanh Commune, in Giong Trom District, was 19 years old and cut her hair for the first time. She claims to have experienced such severe headaches that her parents took her to see a doctor, but even after taking the prescribed treatment, the symptoms persisted. The headaches only went away when her hair started growing longer again, so she has refrained from cutting her locks ever since.

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Drug dealers are always looking for ingenious ways to get their products past checkpoints, and sometimes they exhibit some truly outside-the-box thinking.

The attention of Italian customs officers at Malpensa Airport was recently drawn by a small package from Colombia to a man named Santino D’Antonio. If you’re not an action flick buff, that name most likely means nothing to you, but if you’re a fan of John Wick movies starring Keanu Reeves, you probably recognize it as the name of the mafia boss and main antagonist in John Wick 2. Luckily, the officers recognized the name, and decided to inspect the package more thoroughly…

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Thyrinteina leucocerae, the caterpillar of the geometer moth, is targeted as a host for a species of parasitoid wasp that can lay up to 80 eggs inside its body. The caterpillar’s reward is a job as bodyguard for the very parasites growing inside it and a slow, agonizing death.

The Glyptapanteles wasp is one of nature’s most fascinating and, at the same time, terrifying body-snatchers. Not only does its lay dozens of eggs into caterpillar hosts, but scientists claim that the insect can somehow change the behavior of the host, turning into a mindless bodyguard whose only mission is to protect the wasp’s eggs against predators. Once the wasp grubs hatch out of its body and begin to spin their pupae, the caterpillar stops moving, stops eating, gets on its hind legs and goes into statue mode. But at the slightest threat for the wasp “babies”, it starts swinging its head violently to drive predators away.

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Wat Pariwat, in Bangkok, Thailand, gets its famous nickname – “David Beckham Temple” – from a gold-plated statue of the English former football player holding up a statue of Buddha. But that’s just one of the unexpected characters you’re bound to notice visiting this unusual holy place.

David Beckham’s statue was installed at Pariwat Temple in 1999, when the sculptor, who happened to be a die-hard Manchester United fan, was allowed to include it as a permanent temple decoration as a symbol of his love for the club. It has since become famous all over the world and has even given the temple its nickname. But this statue isn’t all that’s unusual about this Buddhist temple, not even close. Among Buddhist-themed artworks and representations of mythical creatures, you’ll notice some characters that don’t quite belong, like Batman or Albert Einstein…

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In a time when traveling the world isn’t as simple as it used to be, a site that lets you experience the view from a window halfway around the world sounds pretty interesting. That’s where Window Swap comes in.

Developed by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam, a husband and wife team from Singapore, as a quarantine project, Window Swap is an easy and ingenious way to travel all around the world, from the comfort of your own home. All you have to do is visit the Window Swap website and click on the “Open a new window somewhere in the world” button to instantly be transported in a stranger’s home in cities like London, Bangalore or Jakarta from the windows of whom you can admire the views they wake up to every day.

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After seeing his business affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, a Michigan jeweler decided to close shop and make money by using about $1 million in precious metals as treasure for would-be treasure hunters willing to pay for clues.

Johnny Perri has been a jeweler his whole life, after learning the business from his father, but the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus proved too hard for his shop in Macomb County, Michigan. He had to options: either sell everything and retire, or find a new way to make money using the jewelry. Perri and his wife chose option two, allegedly burying or otherwise hiding around $1 million-worth of jewelry in dozens of spots, from the Detroit metropolitan area through the Upper Peninsula. Now the jeweler is challenging people to go hunting for his treasures and claim them for themselves, if they can find it.

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