54-year-old Michael Vaudreuil is used to picking up things at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts. He has been working as custodian there for the last eight years, vacuuming the carpets, cleaning the floors, wiping the blackboards and picking up the trash. But last month, Vaudreuil picked up something he’ll actually want to hang on to – a degree in mechanical engineering.

In 2008, Vaudreuil, a self-employed plastering contractor, with two decades of successful entrepreneurship under his belt, felt his world crashing down on him. As recession hit, less phone calls were coming in, but he tried not to panic. Soon, clients stopped calling completely and he had no choice but to file for bankruptcy. Soon, his home was foreclosed, his car repossessed and without his income to support his wife’s vending machine business, that eventually went under as well. He and his family moved into a tiny apartment and Michael started looking for jobs with construction companies, but no one was hiring.

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If you’re all alone on your couch watching TV and can’t decide between drinking a glass of wine or stuffing yourself with ice-cream, you’ll be happy to know you can now have both, thanks to Winecream, an ingenious dessert that combines wine and gourmet ice-cream.

Created by Crossroads Company, a family-owned business in Baltimore, Winecream is a mashup of craft-made fruit wines and super-premium, gourmet ice-cream. Customers get to choose a wine from various house-made options including pineapple, mixed berry, peach, or strawberry, which is then mixed in to a cream and sugar base and flash frozen using liquid nitrogen, a food-safe cryogenic liquid that’s nearly -320 degrees Fahrenheit. First announced back in 2014, Winecream has so far only been available at wine festivals and private events, but Crossroads Company has recently made the adult dessert available for online orders and plans to launch it in liquor stores in Baltimore and Washington D.C. later this summer.

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You couldn’t tell by simply looking at them, but the fish, toast and various other foods depicted below are actually just blocks of wood expertly hand-carved and painted by Japanese artist Seiji Kawasaki.

Unsurprisingly, Kawasaki’s masterpieces have been getting a lot of attention online, ever since he started posting them on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. His creations are regularly featured on Japanese television and in various other media outlets, as well as art exhibitions around the country. Now, the internet has given the talented wood artist access to an international audience and they are just eating up his delicacies; not literally, of course, but I can understand being tempted to bite into one of his realistic-looking wooden croissants or chocolate bars.

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After French tattoo artist JC Sheitan Tenet lost his right hand 22 years ago, he never thought he would ever be able to use it again. He trained himself to use his left hand to do tattoos, but after recently receiving the world’s first tattoo machine prosthesis, he can proudly call himself ambidextrous.

Tenet got the idea for the unique steampunk-inspired prosthesis after seeing the work of Jean Louis Gonzales, a.k.a. Gonzal, an artist and engineer known for his mechanised taxidermies and skulls. After meeting Gonzal at various tattoo conventions, Tenet asked him if he could somehow mechanise an old prosthesis he had lying around the house, and the two started working on a prototype.

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Combining razor-sharp axes and alcohol sounds like a very bad idea, but it seems to be working for the Timber Lounge, a popular axe-throwing bar in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

The Timber Lounge offers patrons sick of urban sports like bowling, darts or pool a new way to unwind. Axe-throwing has long been a popular pastime among lumberjacks in Nova Scotia, and Darren Hudson, a fifth-generation sawmill operator from Shelburne County, decided to bring it to the masses. He partnered with fellow axe-throwing enthusiast Marc Chisholm and together they founded the city’s first axe-throwing lounge. Adrenalin junkies can get their fix by balancing sharp hatchets and double-edged axes over their heads before hurling them at painted wooden bullseyes. Between sessions, they can step into the lounge area to enjoy Nova Scotia food and craft beers.

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Chelsie Hill knew she wanted to become a dancer ever since she was 3 years old, and not even a life-altering accident that left her paralyzed from the waist down was going to wreck her dream. She learned to use her wheelchair as part of her body and started to dance again. Today she is an acclaimed hip-hop dancer, motivational speaker and a fine example that when life gives you lemons, you can indeed make lemonade.

“Dance is the only thing my daughter has ever wanted to do,” Chelsie’s mother Wendy Hill says. She won her first competition at age five and kept turning in stellar performances all through her school years. She made the high-school varsity dance team as a freshman and everything seem to point to a successful career as a professional dancer. But then, tragedy struck. After a party, Chelsie got in a car with a drunk driver who hit a tree head-on at 40mph. She survived the ordeal, but was diagnosed as a T10 paraplegic. The aspiring dancer retained full control of her upper body, but doctors told her that she would never walk again. She was just 17 at the time.

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Every year, hundreds of millions of Monarch Butterflies from Canada and the United States journey as far as 2,500 miles to the forests of Michoacan, Mexico in what is known as the world’s largest insect migration. Countless butterflies cluster together both on the trees and on the ground, covering large areas into carpets of orange and black. It’s a breathtaking sight to behold, but as always, human greed is threatening to destroy it.

The great monarch migration is one of nature’s most fascinating mysteries. Tiny butterflies from places like Toronto, Winnipeg or Detroit embark on this epic transcontinental journey and somehow make it all the way to central Mexico. Nobody knows exactly how they do it, but some experts believe they are guided by celestial navigation and magnetic fields.

The Monarch butterflies start to arrive in Michoacan in late October to make their winter home in the trees high up in the mountains of the natural reserve. Once here, they will spend the next five months clustering together in large masses made up of thousands of tiny bodies that often look like colorful beehives. Often times, these clusters become so heavy that they cause tree branches to bend or even snap. But there’s a purpose to all these clustering – it allows the monarchs to survive in the low nighttime temperatures at these high altitudes.

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Don’t you hate it when you’re using your smartphone on public transportation and notice strangers looking at it over your shoulder? Those people are the worst! But thanks to Celal Göger special glasses, you won’t have to deal with them ever again.

Göger, a 42-year-old mobile phone repairman from the Turkish town of Bismil, Diyarbakır province, has invented special glasses that interact with a smartphone’s screen so that only the wearer can see it. He said he came up with the idea for the glasses four months ago, when, while checking his emails on the local tram, he noticed people on the packed vehicle were staring at the screen of his phone. He realized it was a serious privacy issue that surely other people were facing on a daily basis. So he went back to his phone repair shop and started working on a solution.

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Justin Salas was only 14 when he lost his sight almost completely and was declared legally blind. Now 22, the ambitious young man is a living example that nothing is impossible – even though he can’t see, Justin is a professional photographer and skilled rock climber.

Justin’s blindness wasn’t the result of an unfortunate accident or a sudden occurrence where he woke up one morning to find that he couldn’t see anymore. His eyesight had always been poor and he started wearing glasses when he was 5-years-old. But it wasn’t until his freshman year of high-school that his vision started deteriorating at a rapid pace. His glasses no longer helped and tests revealed that his optic nerves were dying, although the cause was a mystery for all the doctors he’d seen.

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Some people would try anything in their desperate attempt to combat the natural effects of aging. One trend that’s been blowing up (pun intended) in recent years is Carboxy Therapy – pumping carbon dioxide under the skin to treat stretch marks, loose skin, cellulite or dark circles under the eyes.

So how does Carboxy therapy work, you ask? It’s quite simple really. Using a fine needle hooked up to a carbon dioxide tank, gas is slowly pumped under the skin. The procedure itself is reportedly not painful at all, with patience feeling nothing but a tingling sensation. Once under the skin, the CO2 causes a slight disruption in the red blood cells due to the sudden overflow of a gas that our bodies produce naturally as cellular waste. Blood vessels expand, improving circulation to the oxygen deprived area and leaving the skin looking healthier and more youthful. It works differently for various conditions. For example, CO2 destroys fat cells, which helps remove cellulite, while in the case of stretch marks, the increased blood flow improves collagen production.

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Wouldn’t it be nice if we could have an espresso machine for beer and bypass the whole fermentation process? It sounds like simple wishful thinking, but it turns out such a thing actually exists, and has for some time now.

SodaStream has been selling home carbonation machines that let you turn tap water into soda for over two and a half decades, and now it looks all set to enter the beer market, as well. The company has apparently come up with an instant beer concentrate that works with their soda machines, allowing anyone to turn water into beer at the press of a button.

The new Beer Bar kit turns SodaStream machines into microbreweries, enabling you to create crafted beer in seconds by simply adding a unique “Blondie” concentrate. The resulting brew has 4.5% alcohol content and allegedly has a “smooth authentic taste and a hop-filled aroma.” According to a company statement, one liter of Blondie yields three liters of cold brewski.

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Can you imagine never telling another lie – not even an innocent one – for the rest of your life? How about for a whole day? Yeah, me neither, which is why Keith Frankel’s commitment to a no-lie lifestyle is so intriguing.

Up until six months ago, Keith Frankel, a product design executive at Boston education software startup Firecracker, was no different than the rest of us – he would lie on a daily basis, and he was fully aware of it. He admits he had been aware of his ability to lie both persuasively and effectively and that his skills only got better with age. “Sometimes, my career necessitated that I play my little trump card in order to succeed at ‘the game’. Other times, my personal life could be made just a bit more convenient with a little fib here or there. To no surprise, the more I lied, the better I became at lying in the future. Lying, like any other skill, only gets stronger the more you use it,” Frankel says.

He didn’t really see the harm in lying, at first, especially since his little white lies didn’t really have disastrous consequences on the lives of those around him, they were just “little deceptions, teeny, tiny misdirections.” But at one point, Keith realized that having his friends and family seeing him constantly lie to other people had planted seeds of distrust in them – they knew that he could very well lie to them if he so wished (and he admits he did). He felt these ‘tiny erosions of trust’, as he calls them, not only weakened his relationship with his loved ones, but also called into question everything he claimed to be and will eventually become. Worse still, once plated, these seeds of doubt slowly whether relationships and are almost impossible to address effectively.

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Despite being born with congenital cataracts and having just 10 percent of a normal person’s vision during the day, when the night comes amateur astronomer Tim Doucette can see things most of us cannot.

When he was just a teenager, Doucette underwent an operation that removed the lenses from his eyes, and widened his pupils, in order to improve his weak sight. A normal person’s pupils automatically adjusts according to the amount of light coming in, but Tim’s are always open, letting in a lot  of light. During the day, everything he sees is extremely bright and overexposed, even when wearing glasses to protect his eyes from the light. His vision is about 10 percent that of the average person. However, at night time, everything changes…

The first time he noticed the special side-effect of his operation was when he first took off the bandages from his eyes. “I just had the bandage removed from one of my eyes, and looking up at the Milky Way and it was like a curtain had been lifted, it was just amazing,” Doucette remembers. At first, he actually thought he had a detached retina, as he was seeing millions of bright spots, but soon realized he was looking at the stars of our galaxy. 12 years ago, Tim’s wife, Amanda, who is also visually impaired, bought him a telescope and he took up astronomical observing as a hobby.

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Getting up early in the morning to the annoying sound of an alarm clock is one of those painful experiences many of us have to go through every single day, but perhaps throwing in the smell of freshly brewed coffee might improve things a bit. That’s what the makers of The Bariseur alarm clock are counting on, anyway.

The Bariseur is an automatic coffee maker and tea brewer that also doubles as an alarm clock that wakes you up to the sound of bubbling hot water and the smell of fresh coffee or loose leaf tea. Inventor Joshua Renouf says his ingenious creation “encourages a ritual in order to establish a routine before going to sleep, signalling to the body and mind that it is time to unwind and relax. The fresh coffee or tea is used as a natural aromatic relaxant throughout the night then stimulates the user in the morning once brewed.”

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In the span of just one year, a young Chinese conman reportedly managed to fool 11 other men into thinking that he was their dream girl before disappearing with large sums of money. Believe it or not, the guy even managed to trick one of them into a wedding after telling him that “she” was pregnant.

A man surnamed Wang, from China’s Huaiyang county, recently got the shock of his life after police told him that his “pregnant” runaway bride was actually a guy cross-dressing as a woman. Last October, Wang was overjoyed when his girlfriend, who he had met online, told him she was expecting a baby. The man’s family shared their happiness and immediately started planning a big wedding and grand feast. The joyous event went off without a hitch, but three days later, the bride simply vanished, taking with her gifts and valuables worth tens of thousands of Chinese yuan. He was probably to embarrassed to report his wife missing just days from the wedding, and his family thought they probably had a fight, so they didn’t alert the authorities either.

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