Looking at Toshihiko Hosaka’s incredibly detailed sculptures, it’s hard to believe that they are made from grainy beach sand, and not some sort of clay. But he only uses sand, his talent and 20-years of experience.

43-year-old Hosaka has been making sand sculptures ever since he was in school, and has been honing his skills for over two decades. Today, he is able to create large-scale masterpieces without any molds or adhesives, only simple sand and a handful of metal sculpting tools. He spends hours, sometimes several days sculpting away at mounds of moist sand, but the result is always breathtaking.

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Eduardo Donato is one of the many pig farmers in Spain who specialize in “jamón”, a traditional cured ham recognized for its delicious taste and nutritional value. However, his jamón is special. It is widely recognized as the most delicious ham in the world, and, at €4,100 ($4,600) per leg, also the most expensive.

Up until 1989, Eduardo Donato owned a profitable construction company in the city of Tarragona, and specialized in the restoration of 15th and 16th century buildings. Everything was great, he had a good, comfortable life and business was booming. But then, one of his closest colleagues succumbed to cancer, and, soon after, another one died of a heart-attack. He realized that, with all the stress of life in the big city and managing his business, he could be next. To make matters worse, his beautiful city had been “disfigured” by petrochemical and nuclear plants built nearby. Donato realized he didn’t want to live there anymore, so he sold his business and his home, and went looking for paradise.

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You probably never even knew you wanted colored LED eyelashes, but just look at the pretty lights. Yeah, you want them!

Swedish Arduino designer Tien Pham has been getting a lot of attention lately for an unusual tech-inspired beauty product – interactive LED eyelashes that stick to your eyelids with regular eyelash glue. Called F.Lashes, these eye-catching accessories come in pink, red, blue, light blue, white, yellow and green, and feature different lighting modes, like follow, where the lights follow the movements of your head, dance mode, where they just blink at short intervals when you move your body, and sparkle, with the LEDs lighting up individually to create a sparkle effect.

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One of the last things you would normally expect to find on an uninhabited island in the South Pacific is plastic, and yet the beaches of Henderson Island are riddled with nearly 40 million pieces of plastic, ranging from toothbrushes to shopping bags and bottles.

According to a recent report published in the in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences” journal, Henderson Island currently has zero inhabitants and around 17 tonnes of plastic trash, with around 13,000 pieces washing up on its shores every single day. The tiny patch of land has been found by marine scientists to have the highest density of debris recorded anywhere in the world.

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Bottle Cap Alley is a unique roadside attraction located at the north edge of the Texas A&M University campus, in College Station Texas. As the name suggests, it is paved with hundreds of thousands – by some accounts, millions – of beer and soda bottle caps.

No one knows exactly how the tradition of paving the 50-meter-long by 2-meters-across alley with metal caps began, but seeing as it is located between the iconic Dry Bean pub and the Dixie Chicken restaurant, some people believe that it started out as a dumping site for the two establishments. Patrons who took their drinks outside followed their example, and as word of the Bottle Cap Alley spread, other local bars started bringing in their nightly haul of bottle caps here as well. It is estimated that the tradition goes back four decades.

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The word heliography usually refers to a photographic process invented in 1822, but Colorado-based artist Michael Papadakis has given it a new meaning after using it to describe his art of harnessing the sun to burn intricate artworks onto wooden panels with a magnifying glass.

Up until five years ago, Michael Papadakis used to create art the old fashioned way, with painting and drawing supplies, but on a trip along the Silk Road from Asia to Europe, he discovered a new and ingenious tool – the magnifying glass.

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The story of Sindhutai Sapkal is one of incredible determination in the face of adversity, rebirth and love of children who nobody else wanted. The 68-year-old has raised over 1,400 orphans, offering them not just food and shelter, but also the love of a real family. Her amazing work has earned her over 750 awards, and the nickname “Mother of Orphans”.

Sapkal runs four orphanages in her home town of Prune, India’s Maharashtra state – two for girls and two for boys – with the help of her biological daughter, Mamta, and her eldest adopted children, some of whom have become lawyers, doctors and professors. The children under her care were found trying to fend for themselves in railway station, abandoned in dustbins, or even dragged by stray dogs in the streets. New ones are brought to her orphanages all the time, and as long as they are eligible for adoption, she never turns them away. But unlike state-run orphanages, the Mother of Orphans doesn’t give her children up for adoption with other families, and doesn’t turn them away when they turn 18.

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Stella Sironen, a young makeup artist from Finland, recently shared a photo of her with her eyebrows split down the middle like bird feathers, joking that she was starting a new beauty trend. Little did she know that the internet would end up taking her seriously.

Sironen, whose makeup skills have earned her over 48,000 followers on Instagram, posted the viral photos of her sporting feathered brows a few days ago, crediting her friend @leevitu for coming up with the trick while brushing her eyebrows. He apparently used a glue stick to split the eyebrows down the middle horizontally and brush the eyebrows up and down to achieve that aviary look. As Stella later admitted, she jokingly captioned the first photo with the text “so i’m starting this new brow trend please recreate it and wear it everyday and dont forget to tag me like and subscribe and hit that bell button.” Only people apparently didn’t get the joke.

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Cold hands are apparently a big problem for professional gamers and office workers, so a couple of young Danish entrepreneurs set out to find an efficient hand-warming solution. This ingenious keyboard heat lamp is the result of their work and research.

One night in May 2016, Emil Frølund and Mats Sørensen were playing Counter Strike in Emil’s basement. They were getting “owned” by their opponents, and like any real gamer, they had all sorts of excuses – bad teammates, slow internet connection, cold hands. And while they couldn’t do very much about the first two, that last one was definitely not out of their hands. That night, in a small basement, in Aarhus, Denmark, the Heatbuff keyboard lamp was born.

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Unable to find a prosthetic hand that fit him him properly, Leonardo Viscarra, a 14-year-old boy from Bolivia, decided to build one himself, using 3D-printing technology.

Leonardo was born with an undeveloped left hand. As a fetus in his mother’s womb, the boy’s right hand was caught in the placenta and unable to develop properly. He was diagnosed with amniotic band syndrome at birth, and could never use his left hand for basic tasks like picking up or grabbing objects. However, an incident during his childhood sparked an interest in assembling and building things, which ultimately helped him achieve his goal of one day gaining almost full use of his undeveloped hand.

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Migingo, a tiny rock island on Lake Victoria, in Kenya, measures just 0.49 acres, but is officially home to 131 residents – although some sources put the population at around 1,000 – making it the most densely populated island in the world.

The so-called “Iron Clad Island” of Migingo (after the metal shack shanty town covering it almost entirely) has a very unclear history. According to some accounts, it was originally settled by two Kenyan fishermen, Dalmas Tembo and George Kibebe, who came here in 1991 and laid the foundation of today’s community. Others say that it was a Ugandan, Joseph Unsubuga, who came here first and then brought more of his fishing friends. It was this kind of contradicting stories, and the battle over the island’s fish-rich waters that created a long-standing conflict over the ownership of Migingo between Kenya and neighboring Uganda.

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Two Muslim women in India have recently filed complaints against their husbands – who happen to be brothers – for divorcing them via WhatsApp.

The “triple talaq” is a controversial clause in Sharia Law that allows husbands to instantly divorce their wives by uttering the word “talaq” three times. This allows men to throw their wives out of the house for literally any reason, without fearing any legal repercussions. The practice is frowned upon by the vast majority of Muslims and banned in most of the Islamic world, but not in India. Here, triple talaq is still frequently used, keeping women in a perpetual state of fear that their husbands could “give them talaq” if they say or do anything that displeases them.

Ironically, more an more Indian Muslims are using modern technology to make the archaic triple talaq divorce even more effective. Data shows that a growing number of men are now sending the words to their wives via email or messaging apps, which is perfectly legit. ‘How can that be legal?’ you ask, well, according to the law, the woman doesn’t even have to be present when the words are spoken, she need not even be aware. If the guy says them, it’s done!

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If you’ve ever been to Switzerland you already know that pretty much everything is expensive there, and the fresh mountain air is apparently no exception. Well, most of it is actually free, but if you want to order a liter of Swiss mountain air collected from a secret location in the Alps, you’ll have to cough up a whopping $167. This is not a joke!

John Green, a British expat living in Basel, Switzerland, is the brains behind “Genuine Mountain Air from Switzerland”, a fledgling online business that promises to ship fresh, high-quality Swiss air anywhere around the world, if you can afford it. Green claims to collect the air from a “secret location” near the town of Zermatt, then bottles it up in glass containers, labels it and ships it to buyers.

Described as “the ultimate present for the man or woman that has everything,” the bottled mountain air also comes with a certificate of authenticity and the exact GPS collection of the place it was collected from.

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With food shortage expected to become a major problem in the next decades, many experts believe that insects could become a major source of nutrients for people in the future. We already have plenty of insect based recipes and restaurants have begun putting bugs on their menus, but we need an effective way of using them as replacements for staples of our current diet, like wheat. Well, a couple of Brazilian food scientists have make a breakthrough in that area after successfully turning a species of cockroaches into flour and using it to bake bread.

Andressa Lucas and Lauren Menegon, two engineering students at the Federal University of Rio Grande, in Brazil, have developed a flour made from cockroaches that contains 40% more protein than regular wheat flour and can be used to make all kinds of baked goods. It also contains lots of essential amino acids, as well as amino acids and lipids. And before you start acting all disgusted, the flour is not made from bugs like tho ones crawling through your kitchen at night, but of a species called Nauphoeta cinerea. They are sourced from a specialized breeder, where they are produced according to the hygiene requirements of the ANVISA, the Brazilian health surveillance agency, and fed exclusively on fruits and vegetables.

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Weed and fitness apparently go well together, and the Power Plant Fitness gym, in San Francisco, wants to prove that once and for all by allowing clients to consume cannabis in various forms, while they work out. Power Plant Fitness advertises itself as the world’s first cannabis-friendly gym.

Before you get the wrong idea about this place, it’s important to mention that Power Plant Fitness “won’t be a place to get high and just screw around,” quite the opposite. Co-founders Jim McAlpine and Ricky Williams claim that they are “focused on the athletic side, not the cannabis side,” and that they want to tackle the stereotype that pot users are lazy. The new gym will use cannabis as a tool to improve members’ concentration and speed up their post-workout recovery. McAlpine says he experienced the positive effects of weed while skiing, and that gave him the idea to try it in a gym environment.

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