Although stretch marks are a typical, albeit annoying, part of life, most people wish that they could make them permanently disappear. There is an entire industry built around creams, lotions, and even surgery to help conceal these imperfections, but a Brazilian tattoo artist has developed a much simpler, more effective solution.

Rodolpho Torres, of São Paulo, uses flesh colored ink to hide stretch marks as well as circles under the eye. His exact method is a closely guarded secret, but we know that it involves creating an optical illusion via tattoo shading. Anvisa (National Agency of Sanitary Surveillance) has approved his ink, and he personalizes each mixture to achieve a tone similar to that of the client’s skin. The ink blends into the stretch marks and dark circles, giving them the color of the skin. Once the tattoos have healed, the client’s skin appears smoother, and after sixty days they can sunbathe without the risk of spots developing.

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A Belgian man had to be cut free from his art installation after failing to liberate himself after 19 days. Mikes Poppe had tethered himself by the ankle to a three-meter (10ft) chain that ran through a massive four-ton block of marble and spent 438 hours attempting to chisel his way to freedom.

The performance took place in the courthouse of the coastal Belgian city of Ostend. Poppe ate, slept, and washed there while chained to the block, all while live streaming to Youtube. He worked toward liberation from his self-imposed captivity by chiseling toward the stone every day, but after 19 days had to be cut free by a workman with an angle grinder.

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Austrian designer Klemens Schillinger has created a therapeutic replacement for smartphones called Substitute Phones. The Vienna-based designer made a series of five of these non-devices which feature a row of stone beads to imitate various motions typical to smartphone use, such as scrolling, zooming, and swiping.

By using stone beads to emulate interaction with a phone’s touchscreen, Schillinger aims to create therapeutic tools that can provide the physical simulation that frequent smartphone users crave, and help them cope with the withdrawal symptoms of being away from their phones for long periods of time

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The German town of Staufen is falling apart at the seams. The town of 8,100 residents, located on the edge of the Black Forest, decided to invest in geothermal energy back in 2007, aiming for a green energy future. Unfortunately, the decision backfired when the underground drilling went wrong causing hundreds of buildings to begin cracking apart.

The town rests on a layer of soft anhydrite, below which is a layer of groundwater confined to an aquifer. It was this combination which proved to be fatal for the Baden Württenburg hamlet. When the drills hit the groundwater, it poured into the anhydrate, which soon formed gypsum and expanded by about 50 percent. Over 270 buildings have suffered fractures in the ten years since and things don’t appear to be getting any better.

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Gun violence is a very serious issue on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, so much so that people have begun using a smartphone app similar to the popular “Waze”, only instead of heavy traffic, they’re trying to avoid gun fire.

Rio de Janeiro is facing a crisis of gun violence, as police raids and shootouts between drug gangs echo daily through the streets of Brazil’s second largest city. Civilians are continuously caught and killed in the crossfires, with harrowing stories, such as that of a pregnant woman being shot in the stomach, continually emerging from the beleaguered city. The hardest hit area is the Maré complex of poor favela neighborhoods, the residents of which fear even walking down the street, both at night and during the day.

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A poor dog has reportedly “died of a broken heart” after being abandoned by her owner at an airport in Colombia. She spent the last month of her life wandering around the airport in search of her master and eventually stopped eating as a result of severe depression.

The distressed dog, named Nube Viajera (Traveling Cloud) by the veterinarians who rescued her from Palonegro airport, near Bucaramanga, and looked after her until the very end, was only about two years old, but after a month of wandering around sniffing passengers and refusing to accept food and water, she had become so weak that she was barely able to stand. Witnesses said that in the last days of her life, the animal gave up her daily search and crawled into an isolated corner, refusing to accept any food that passengers and airport staff offered her. She was finally taken to a veterinarian clinic after someone alerted the Friends of Animals and Nature Foundation of Bucaramanga, but despite their best efforts, she died within 48 hours of being rescued.

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Manabu Kosaka, an artist from Saitama, Japan, has a very special skill – he can recreate virtually any wristwatch model exclusively out of high-quality Kent paper. The results of his painstaking labor are so utterly incredible that the saying “seeing is believing” doesn’t really apply.

So how does one go about recreating a seemingly perfect replica of a Rolex or Casio wristwatch out of nothing but paper? You could probably use a special 3D printer or some other advanced device, but Manabu Kosaka does it all by hand, first drawing the design on a sheet of Kent paper, and then using rudimentary tools like glue, dremels, an Xacto knife to cut tiny characters as small as 1 mm in size, and tweezers to place them at just the right place. I still can’t understand how he can mould the paper dials and the wristbands of the watches in such great detail, but they are certainly impressive to look at.

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Mohamed Bzeek, a 62-year-old Muslim immigrant in California, has spent the past two decades caring for terminally ill foster children. These children are neglected by the foster care system, frequently spending the whole of their short lives in state-run hospitals, and rarely get to experience love, hope, and laughter.

About 600 of the 35,000 children monitored by the Los Angeles County’s Department of Children and Family Services fall under the care of the department’s Medical Case Management Services, which serves those with the most severe medical needs. There is a desperate need for loving homes for these children, but Mohamed Bzeek’s is the only foster home in the county known to take them in.

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In 2015 researchers from the University of Cincinnati uncovered a Bronze Age tomb in Pylos, in southwest Greece. It belonged to the so-called ‘Griffin Warrior’, a wealthy Mycenaean man, and dates back 3,500 years. Inside archaeologists uncovered a trove of treasure including precious jewels, armor and weapons, and many vessels made from precious metals. One of the most exciting discoveries, however, came in the form of a seemingly insignificant agate stone. It was covered in limestone initially, and it took a year of careful restoration to reveal its true form.

What lay beneath the limestone is a discovery so astounding that it is set to rewrite art history. As the intricate details of the stone’s design began to emerge, the researchers were astonished to discover that they had unearthed a masterpiece. The agate stone was revealed to be a seal, used for stamping an image onto clay or wax. The seal, named the ‘Pylos Combat Agate’, depicts a fierce hand-to-hand battle between tho warriors, with a third one already crumpled on the ground. The scene was meticulously carved on a 3.6-centimetre piece of hard stone, and some of the details are only half a millimeter in size.

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Boris “Boriska” Kipriyanovich, a 21-year-old boy from Volgograd, Russia, claims that he lived on Mars in a previous life until a nuclear war destroyed the atmosphere and all civilization on the red planet. He was then reborn on Earth, but remembers his previous life.

Boriska began claiming to be from Mars at age three, but his mother, Nadezhda , says that she knew her boy was special since he came into this world. She claims to have felt no pain during labor, and that when she held Boris in her arms for the first time, he looked at her with the focused look of an adult. He allegedly went on to hold his head up unsupported at only two weeks old and spoke his first word by 4 months. Boriska’s mother claims that by the age of one and a half was able to read, draw and paint, and had enrolled him in kindergarten by age 2. His incredible memory and language skills were soon noticed by his teachers.

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An Israeli start-up has introduced an intriguing potential solution to world hunger – fruit fly larvae. The company, Flying SpArk, co-founded by Eran Gronich and Yoram Yerushalmi in 2014, uses fruit fly larvae to make a protein powder (in regular and low-fat varieties) and oil, both of which are odorless and flavorless. These products can then be used to make everything from substitute meat patties to pasta, cereal, and even bread.

Fruit flies have a lifespan of only six days but multiply up to 15 times in that time, making them easy and cheap to farm and harvest. There is virtually no waste created in the process, as all parts of the larvae are used. This gives them an edge over conventional protein sources like poultry or cattle, but also over insects like grasshoppers or crickets, because they have no legs, wings, antennas or eyes. And while, Flying SpArk doesn’t believe its fruit fly powder can completely replace meat, the company hopes that by becoming a part of human diet, it can at least reduce our negative impact on the environment.

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In an attempt to battle “noodle harassment”, a Japanese company created a smart fork that can cancel out a user’s noodle-slurping noises.

Any ramen connoisseur will tell you that proper Japanese ramen etiquette entails slurping your noodles while you eat them, as doing so allows for aeration and full flavor development. This practice, however, can be
disturbing for Westerners and is officially referred to as “noodle harassment”, or “noo-hara” in Japan. The Japanese, however, have no intention of giving up this much loved cultural practice, and so an impasse has been reached. Enter Nissin, the 69-year-old Japanese company that invented instant noodles, and their revolutionary, albeit cumbersome, slurp canceling gadget the Otohiko fork.

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If you’re a diehard vegetarian who can’t bear the smell of cooked meat, or even the thought of living near someone who likes to consume meat, you’ll soon be able to move into a vegetarian-only apartment complex in Russia.

Veda Village, an ongoing construction project in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, Russia, was designed for vegetarians looking to practice a healthy and ethical lifestyle in a community of like-minded people. The first and most important requirement to buy or rent an apartment here is to be a vegetarian. Clients will undergo interviews with sales agents, and if they fail to convince them that they are true vegetarians, their application will get denied. But a meat-free diet is not the only thing required to earn a place in Veda Village. According to developers, smoking and the consumption of alcohol in the residential complex are also prohibited.

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Shayna Leib’s French desserts may look delicious, but they are only meant to be savoured with the eyes. While these exquisite treats may appear to be the work of a talented confectioner, Leib is actually a porcelain and glass artist.

If, like me, you have an insatiable sweet tooth, you’re probably wondering how anyone could be so cruel as to tempt us with these positively mouth-watering desserts that we’ll never get to try. Well, in Shayna Leib’s case, the idea for her “Patisserie” porcelain and glass series was inspired by her own inability to indulge in decadent desserts. Apparently, her body reacts to food with high histamine, salicylate, and copper content, like puff pastry and chocolate mouse, which results in many dietary restriction. So by salivating over photos of her porcelain and glass desserts, you get a taste of how she feels every time she walks by a dessert shop.

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42-year-old Gabi Rizea only discovered his talent for wood carving three years ago, and has since put it to good use, saving dozens of old tree stumps from being completely removed, by turning them into impressive works of art.

A former forest engineer, Rizea became a wood carver completely by accident. Three years ago, after buying himself a new chainsaw, he started “playing” with it on a block of wood he had in his workshop. He tried carving a human face into the wood, and to his surprise, it turned out pretty good. He liked using the chainsaw for art, so he kept honing his skills. Today, he is so good at it that local authorities in his home city of Craiova, Romania, allow him to work his magic on the old tree stumps dotting the local parks.

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