Danish avante-garde artist Kristian von Hornsleth recently drew criticism for his latest project, which involves turning London homeless people into real-life Pokemon that can be tracked 24/7 via a special app. To make matters worse, every “human Pokemon” can be bought for $32,700.

Von Hornsleth, whose previous artistic endeavours include paying poor African villagers to change their name to Hornsleth in exchange for aid, describes his latest idea as an “ethical boundary-smashing work” that “fuses homelessness, privacy invasion, inequality and reality TV, with present day cultural decadence and interactive conceptual art.”

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If you’re the kind of person who always complains about their daily work commute, this story will probably make you feel a bit better about your situation. A Los Angeles man who works in San Francisco has a daily six-hour commute, most of which is done by plane.

Every workday, Curt von Badinski, a mechanical engineer and the CTO of San Francisco-based tech company, Motiv, wakes up at 5 in the morning, takes a shower, gets dressed, has breakfast and hops into his car for a 15-minute drive to Bob Hope Burbank airport, where he boards a single-engine commute plane. He takes a 90-minute flight to Oakland, a city located 353 miles (568km) north west of Los Angeles, and, from there, he gets into his other car and drives to the headquarters of his company, in San Francisco. He gets to work at around 8:30, and does it all over again at 17:00, when he leaves for Los Angeles. He usually gets home around 21:00.

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When receiving an order from Amazon, most people throw way the packaging box immediately, but one Japanese man loves Amazon boxes so much that he has spent the last 9 years collecting them.

So what posses a man to start collecting Amazon cardboard boxes? In the case of Kosuke Saito, from Osaka, Japan, it was the discovery of a pattern of numbers. It all started one day, in 2008, when, while unpacking an Amazon product, he noticed the serial number “XM06” on the packaging and remembered seeing “XM08” on another Amazon box. That got him thinking that if there was an XM06 and an XM08, surely there must be an XM07 as well. He wanted to know what that box was like, but it was only the beginning, because he soon discovered that Amazon boxes come in all shapes and sizes, and he was curious about all of them.

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People are always looking for legal loopholes to help them get away with various crimes, but when it comes to murder, the chances of avoiding a criminal trial are pretty slim. Unless they commit the heinous act in the “Zone of Death”, a remote area of Yellowstone National Park where one can apparently kill someone, openly admit to it, and not face legal consequences.

Brian Kalt, a law professor at Michigan State University, discovered the judicial no-man’s land in 2004, while looking for interesting material for an article. He was researching legal gray areas when he stumbled upon a reference to the unusual jurisdiction of Yellowstone National Park, and red flags went up in his head. He quickly realized that that because of the way that the vast park geographically covers three US states, but only one of them has legal jurisdiction over all of it, getting a murderer on trial would be virtually impossible.

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If you’re a fidgety billionaire looking for a distraction worthy of your financial status, this $17,000 fidget spinner made of solid gold may be just the thing you’ve been waiting for.

We first wrote about Caviar, a Russian company offering all kinds of expensive accessories, in April, when we featured its Credo line of religious-themed gold iPhones priced around $3,500 each. Well, they’re back in the news, this time with their own expensive take on the most popular toy in the world – the fidget spinner. Although, with a price tag of $17,000, I’m not even sure that their version qualifies as a toy.

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Garlic, onions or fish may taste great on your plate, but they also leave your hands smelling disgusting after cooking, and their odor is tough to get rid of. Apparently, this stainless steel soap bar can help with that.

Designed by Amco, the Rub-A-Way Stainless Steel Soap Bar is just that, a piece of stainless steel shaped like a bar of soap that apparently works wonders when you want to remove the smell of garlic, or other sulfurous vegetables from your hands. All you have to do is rub it on your hands, as you would a regular soap bar, while rinsing with water. And, best of all, it lasts forever.

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The “Helmfon” is an oversized noise-canceling helmet that helps you ignore chatty co-workers and other distractions so you can focus on your work at the office.

Created by Ukrainian design company Hochu Rayu, the Helmfon is a giant isolation helmet that uses special sound absorption features to completely block out any outside noise, giving the wearer their own quiet personal space so they can better concentrate on their work. Made of a glass fiber shell, membrane cloth, and foamed polyethylene, the bizarre accessory not only blocks outside sound, but it also keeps the noise you make in, allowing you to answer calls, hold Skype conferences, watch or edit videos, privately.

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At 1,345 meters above sea level, Ben Nevis is definitely not the World’s most difficult mountain to climb. But things get considerably trickier if instead of hiking shoes you put on a pair of 5-inch high heels, especially if you’re a guy. But one English teenager recently proved that it’s not impossible.

Ben Conway, a 19-year-old art student from London, recently took up the challenge of hiking up to the top of the highest mountain in the UK in high-heel shoes, as a way to stand out in an application for a scholarship for the School of Communication Arts in Brixton. Applicants were asked to “make something passionate about something that they are passionate about,” and since Ben loves drag culture and has been scouting for 13 years, he decided that marrying the two hobbies was a good idea.

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Allan Pachino Wallace is a young, talented artist from Nassau, the Bahamas, who recently rose to internet fame with a series of amazing celebrity portraits made only with salt, coffee or baking soda.

Wallace works with all kinds of mediums, from common oil paint and spray paint, to tree leaves and cereal. A quick look at his social media profiles on Facebook or Instagram reveals the versatility and talent of this young artist, but the internet only learned about it after he shared a salt portrait of actor/comedian Kevin Hart on his Facebook page. People loved it and got shared so much that Kevin Hart himself saw it and publicly congratulated Allan on his work.

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54-year-old Abdul Aziz has a very peculiar job. He has been working as a living statue for over thee decades, standing perfectly still for six hours a day and resisting people’s attempts to make him move, smile or pretty much flinch a muscle, anything that proves he is a living person. Nobody has ever been able to do it.

Aziz, fondly known as “India’s Statue Man”, has been performing his daily routine ever since 1985, soon after getting a job as a security guard at the VGP Golden Beach Resort in Chennai, India. His boss had recently traveled to the UK, where he was so impressed by the statue-like members of the Royal Guard outside Buckingham Palace that he wanted to do something similar back home. So he had his security guards undergo three months of training, where they would sit perfectly still for around four hours. They weren’t allowed to talk or smile, eat, drink, or even shoo away a fly if it sat on their faces. In the end, Abdul proved the best of the group, so he got the strange job.

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Suffering a slipped or herniated disc is no joke. It can be excruciatingly painful and, in severe cases, it requires spine surgery and months of recovery. But for one chiropractor in Malaysia, fixing a slipped disc is as easy as knocking it back into position with a hammer.

Md Rosdi Hasan has a very unconventional way of dealing with slipped discs and back pain in general. Instead of relying on MRIs or X-rays to diagnose his patients’ back problems, he just uses his fingers to check if all the bones and vertebrae are in the right place, and draws a diagram of all the discs directly on the back of his patients, with a black marker. Once he learns everything he needs to know, Hasan grabs a hammer and a piece of wood and starts knocking the discs back into place.

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A Japanese Visual Key air band called Golden Bomber recently treated fans to one of the strangest concerts ever, an 8-second performance to promote their latest single, an 8-second song called “8 Second Encounter”

On June 29, fans of Golden Bomber started showing up at Ikebukuro’s Sunshine City mall, in Tokyo, Japan, up to six hours in advance, to make sure they had a stage-side seat, which is pretty ridiculous considering they only got to see their idols for a few moments. The three-minute countdown to their appearance on stage was much longer than the performance itself, which only lasted 8 seconds. As the countdown reached 2 seconds, the four members of Golden Bomber ran up on stage, grabbed their instruments, and performed their new 8-second song before running off the stage to the screams of their delirious fans.

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A team of Russian artisans from the city of Blagoveshchensk spent three months creating a real-life version of the iconic “Iron Throne” from the popular Game of Thrones TV series. They claim it is the only one in the world made out of actual iron swords, as even the one on the show is made of plastic.

The life-size Iron Throne was created by two blacksmiths, a welder, and a couple of artists, all members of the Association of Artisans of Blagoveshchensk and the Amur Region. In a video showcasing the impressive metal artwork, Vadim Nikolayev, one of the people involved in the project, said that the throne required about a half tonne of metal, which was used to forge 387 swords and a few dozen daggers. Some of the blades were hammered into the right shape to create the seat of power and finally welded together.

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72-year-old Irmela Mensah-Schram is a special kind of cleaning lady. For the last 31 years, she has been travelling across Germany, cleaning its streets of hateful messages, be they propaganda posters or graffiti. She has received death threats from neo-nazis and the police have fined her numerous times, but she continues her fight against racism, antisemitism and xenophobia.

Armed with a small scraper and a can of spray-paint, Irmela Mensah-Schram, a.k.a. Germany’s “Hate Destroyer” has been removing or covering up Nazi propaganda and other right-wing slogans across her country for over three decades. For many, she is a hero fighting against hate, while some consider her actions to be in violation of freedom of speech, and even state officials have mixed feelings about her. She has received several awards for her long-term efforts to keep hateful propaganda off the streets, but she has also been fined and even taken to court for damaging others’ property.

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Technology is changing every aspect of our lives and apparently tooth brushing is no exception. Amabrush, the world’s first automatic toothbrush promises to clean your pearly whites in just 10 seconds, with no effort required on your part.

You may never have thought about it before, but you lose tens of hours a year just brushing your teeth. A team of biotech engineers and dental care visionaries want to change that with the help of technology. Their seemingly-revolutionary invention, called Amabrush, looks more like a rubbery mouth-guard than a toothbrush, but promises to clean all your teeth thoroughly, in only 10 seconds, using vibrations created by a small motor, rather than repeated hand motion.

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