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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Sick of listening to his lazy son-in-law complaining about how hard it was to climb the stairs to his 6th floor apartment, a man in Chongqing, China, built a private elevator that only goes up to his apartment.

The man, surnamed Xong, has been living in the Tongliang District apartment building for decades, but never complained about having to walk up to his apartment every day. But when his son-in-law moved in, he had trouble getting used to the daily climb, and always complained about how exhausted he was after walking up the stairs. Tired of his constant wining, Xong decided to do something about it.

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To say that Japanese artist Noriyuki Saitoh is a master when it comes to capturing the anatomical features of tiny insects using only bamboo would be a serious understatement. The level of realism displayed in his creations is simply uncanny.

From the wiry whiskers of grasshoppers to the veiny wings wings of dragonflies and cicadas, the attention to detail in Noriyuki Saitoh’s bamboo insects is breathtaking. It’s true that the natural versatility of bamboo really helps, allowing the artist and his team to bend, score and layer the material to capture every little detail almost to perfection. Or at least that what you’re tempted to believe when you look at his tiny insects, even though things are not quite as they seem.

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Alarmed by how many cigarette butts littered the parks of Amsterdam, two Dutch designers came up with an unusual plan to train crows to pick up the butts and trade them for tasty rewards.

Industrial designers Ruben van der Vleuten and Bob Spikman originally considered using robots to clean the streets of cigarette butts, but they presented a series of difficulties, particularly the complicated programming required to have them vacuuming the buts out of every nook and cranny while trying to avoid bicycles and passers-by. So they turned their attention to one of the most abundant resources of urban areas – birds. Pigeons were the first ones they considered, because they can be found in virtually every city in the world, but a quick search revealed that they aren’t really known for their intelligence, so training them would have been very hard. But the two designers soon found a bird that was both very common around human settlements and much, much smarter – the crow.

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Inal Bersekov is an incredibly talented tattoo artist from Belgium whose black and white, photo-realistic tattoos look printed on the skin of his clients.

There are plenty of celebrated tattoo artists in the world today, each with their own unique styles, but when it comes to inking detailed portraits, you probably won’t find anyone better than Inal Bersekov. The quality of his works is so insane that it’s nearly impossible to tell that you’re looking at someone’s tattoo, and not a black and white photo, or a really good hyper-realistic drawing.

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Feel free to add mosquito-repellent to the already huge list of useful of smartphone features. South-Korean manufacturer LG has recently released the world’s first mosquito repellent smartphone, which uses ultrasonic sound waves to keep the pesky bloodsuckers at bay.

Called the LG K7i, the innovative handheld was unveiled at the  India Mobile Congress last week, and judging by early feedback, it’s set to become a best-seller in mosquito-infested countries. While advertised as a budget smartphone with relatively unimpressive technical specs, the K7i has a very unique advantage – it features LG’s “Mosquito Away” technology which can allegedly repel mosquitoes with the help of ultrasonic sound waves.

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Ever wonder what you would sound like if you had a party hooter stuck in your trachea? Well, thanks to a viral video posted by a doctor in Argentina, you don’t have to try it yourself to find out.

Dr Santiago Gomez Zuviria, of Tucuman, Argentina, recently had to operate on an 8-year-old boy who had accidentally swallowed a small party hooter. It had got stuck in his trachea, so surgery was the only way to remove it, but before carrying out the procedure, the Argentinian doctor decided to film the poor kid as he inhaled, and posted it on his Facebook page as a warning to parents. Little did he know that it would end up going viral, with more than 9 million views, at the time of this writing.

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Sick of playing the same old Halloween pranks every year? Want two pull an original bone-chilling Halloween prank on your friends or family? One Dallas doughnut shop has you covered with a scary clown doughnut delivery service.

Riding the wave of the recent Box Office hit Stephen King’s It, the Hurts Donut shop has decided to implement a new, Halloween-themed delivery option for their delicious treats . For just $5 extra, you can have your donuts delivered by a person dressed as a menacing real-life Pennywise and subsequently scare the pants off of your unsuspecting friends and family members. Not only will this clown deliver a fantastic fright, but he will immediately make amends for your prank by handing the recipient a dozen of Hurts’ delicious treats! Who can stay mad while chowing down on homemade donuts, glazed to perfection?

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As a teacher,  if you want your middle school students to get off their smartphones phones and and actually pay attention in class, you have to get creative. Take Oregon teacher Kyle Hubler for example, who transformed his classroom into an amazingly detailed, Harry Potter inspired dreamland – equipped with wands, owls, and costumes!

Hubler, who teaches seventh and eighth graders at Evergreen Middle School in Hillsboro, first implemented Harry Potter-themed elements to his classroom, last year, and the students loved it. So when he heard that he would moving to a new classroom for the 2017-2018 school year, he decided to go all out and turn into a real-life version of Hogwarts.

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Elmer Padilla, a young construction worker from Manila, Philippines, recently shot to internet fame after photos of his hand-made action figures went viral on multiple social networks.

While being able to make your own action figures is an impressive talent in itself, what really caught people’s attention was the medium used by the Filipino amateur artist – old flip-flops. Photos posted on a Facebook group dedicated to Filipino art show Elmer Padilla cutting colorful flip-flops on a sidewalk using knives and scissors, and assembling them into intricate toys like Transformers, Predator and Marvel superheroes. As you can see in the photos below, his creations are nothing short of awe-inspiring.

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Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that Earth is a spherical planet, supporters of the “flat Earth” theory are still trying to prove that we’ve all been lied to for centuries, and they’re coming up with craziest ways to do it. The last such attempt – taking a spirit level on a plane.

Flat Earth conspiracy theorist and YouTuber D. Marble recently went viral for his ingenious and hilarious attempt to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that Earth is indeed a pancake, not a globe. He actually took a spirit level – the kind used in construction – on a flight from North Carolina to Seattle in order to “monitor whether or not the pilot would dip the nose of the plane to compensate for curvature”. The self-professed realist filmed himself placing a spirit level on his plane seat arm rest to see if the bubble would move as the pilot tipped the nose of the plane to compensate for the planet’s curvature. Only the bubble never moved…

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32-year-old Ben Kurstin, of Humboldt Park, Chicago, has 8,816 dime bags in his apartment, but he’s no drug dealer. The aspiring artist and filmmaker has been collecting drug bags in virtually every color and design imaginable off the streets of Chicago and using them as an art medium.

It all started one day, a couple of years ago, when Ben Kurstin noticed a discarded dime bag on a sidewalk in Humboldt Park, and decided to pick it up out of curiosity. From that point on, whenever he saw drug bags on the street, he would pick them up and take them home. Soon, his unusual habit became an obsession, to the point where he would search for the bags and come home with dozens , sometimes even hundreds of them, every day. He then spent hours cleaning and organizing them by color and design. At one point, he even started thinking of a rational explanation, should police one day stop him, thinking he was a drug dealer.

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Ask anyone if they would pay anything to own another’s person’s poop, and they will most likely say “hell, no”. But everything changes when the said poop becomes a work of art. Case in point, “Artist’s Shit”, a collection of 30g tin cans allegedly containing the poop of Italian artist Piero Manzoni. Art collectors are buying them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

When Piero Manzoni came up with the idea to can his own poop, in 1961, he probably had no idea that his 30g metal containers would one day sell for astronomical prices. In 2007, the Tate art gallery in London, bought one of Manzoni’s 90 cans for £22,350 ($30,000), and while that may seem like a lot for what is literally just canned crap, they actually got a great deal. In 2007, another can of “Merda d’Artista” was auctioned off in Milan, for a whopping £81,000 ($108,000). Crazy, right? Not really, just another good deal, because Manzoni’s cans of poop are currently worth around $300,000 apiece. Last year, someone bought can no. 54 for £182,500 ($242,000). At this rate, they’ll soon be worth millions.

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New York-based startup Entrupy has invented a small, portable scanner that rich people can use to check the authenticity of designer bags in mere seconds.

According to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the global counterfeit industry is worth around 460 billion dollars, a big chunk of which involves counterfeit luxury goods from brands like Louis Vuitton or Channel. The thing about such fakes is that they are often so well-made that the human eye simply cannot tell them apart from originals. That’s where technology come in. Using a high-quality scanner and deep-learning technology, the brilliant minds behind Entrupy, have come up with a device that allows anyone to check the authenticity of luxury products, anytime, anywhere.

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65-year-old Zhang Kehua, a retired mason from Qianjiang, China, has a very unique skill – he can assemble realistic Chinese vases out of thousands of folded plastic playing cards.

We’ve seen people create all kinds of impressive structures by expertly stacking playing cards, but what Zhang Kehua does is on a whole other level. The Chinese retiree has taught himself several methods of folding plastic playing cards so that they can be assembled into life-size vases that even feature traditional decorative patterns. His creations are so flawless that seen from a far, you could swear that they are made of porcelain.

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