Who knew common house flies could be such talented artists? Los Angeles artist John Knuth discovered their potential and started feeding them sugar mixed with watercolor pigments so they could create stunning works of art through their natural external digestive process.

John Knuth is not the first artist to collaborate with nature in order to create art, but his way of doing things is definitely unique. The young American artist harvests hundreds of thousands of house flies from maggots he orders online. Once he has enough, he places them in a closed environment where the surface they can land on is limited to the canvas, and begins feeding them a mixture of sugar, water and watercolor pigments. When flies eat they digest externally so they are in a constant state of regurgitation. After a few weeks, the entire canvas is covered with millions of tiny colorful specks of fly vomit, and a surprisingly beautiful painting is revealed. Chance plays a big role in this collaborative artistic effort, but Knuth says he has greater control than is revealed in the artworks (colors, build ups etc).

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Palmistry, the art of predicting the future by reading palm lines, has always been very popular in Japan, only now modern day believers are taking matters into their own hands by using plastic surgery to alter or extend their life, love and success lines, and hopefully change fate.

Do you want to live a long and healthy life, find the man/woman of your dreams or win the lottery? Changing your fortunes may seem impossible, but an increasing number of Japanese are confident it’s as easy as altering your palm lines through plastic surgery. A reporter from The Daily Beast sat down with Takaaki Matsuoka, a plastic surgeon at the Shonan Beauty Clinic, who has so far performed 20 of these palm-line altering surgeries. Matsuoka knew nothing about palmistry until two years ago, when a client walked into his office and asked him to change some of her palm lines. Unsure he could pull off such a procedure, the doctor started searching through medical journals and found it was already practiced in Korea. He studied the methods and after the patient confirmed what she wanted altered, he performed the surgery for ¥100,000 ($1,000). It turned out alright, and since then 37 clients have had their palm lines changed or added at the Shonan Beauty Clinic alone.

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Accidents caused by drunk driving are a major problem  all around the world, and the city-state of Singapore is no exception. With over 2140 reported cases of drunk driving in the last 12 months, authorities are having problems dealing with the issue efficiently. Luckily, Zouk, one of the hottest nightclubs in South-East Asia seems to have come up with an ingenious way to thwart the dangerous practice.

Statistics show almost every drunk driver thinks he is sober enough to drive, but what if you could show them they are wrong and convince them to take a taxi home instead? That’s the idea behind Zouk’s pee analyzing urinals. The nightclub partnered with marketing agency DDB Group to create a unique system of identifying and testing drunk drivers that would discourage patrons from driving home intoxicated. They started by replacing the usual parking coupons with RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Device) cards which were exchanged with car keys by the club’s valets. Then they fitted every urinal with pee-analyzing gadgets that could detect alcohol in the urine and reset for every new user. The gadgets were connected to an RFID reader which identified drivers through their parking cards. If their alcohol level was above the legal limit, the card was tagged and a message was displayed above the urinal, telling them they’ve had too much to drink and advising them to call a cab or use Zouk’s drive home system.

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Snail slime is believed to have an anti-ageing effect on human skin and beauty product companies have been using as an ingredient for around two decades. Now, a Japanese beauty salon is taking things to a whole new level by offering a treatment where live snails are put directly on clients’ faces to cover them in slime.

For a lot of women, having snails crawling on their faces is the stuff of nightmares, but the owners of Tokyo-based beauty salon Ci:z Labo are hoping some will actually be willing to pay for it. According to Ci:z Labo spokeswoman Manami Takamura, snail slime removes old cells from a person’s skin, moisturizes it and treats sun burn effects. The treatment, called the Celebrity Escargot Course, costs Y24,150 ($241) and involves four snails bought from an organic snail breeder in Japan and kept in sterile conditions. An assistant gently places the snails on the patient’s previously washed face and let’s them crawl freely. If they get too close to the person’s mouth, eyes or nostrils, she picks them up and places them back on an area where they feel less uncomfortable. The slimy facial is a central part of this 60-minute treatment and is followed by a series of massages, masks and electrical pulse machines using creams infused with snail mucus which ensure the secretions penetrate the skin properly.

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Italian car-maker Fiat has partnered with renowned body painter Craig Tracy to advertise their sporty Fiat 500 Abarth in a truly unique fashion.

Craig Tracy is a master of body-painted optical illusions. From realistic animals to breathtaking sceneries, he is able to create just about anything from a a few expertly-painted flexible bodies, but he has really outdone himself for this new Fiat advert. The talented artist spent five days working with a team of female circus performers and contortionists, mapping out each one’s position in this human vehicle model and painting all the tiny details on their bodies. Although it would have been much easier, photographer RJ Mura says the team never even considered doing it in Photoshop, and that everyone strived to get the human Abarth looking just right without relying on post-production editing. All things considered, the end result is mind-blowing.

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Sean Le Vegan, a dog lover from Manchester, England, will spend over a month in an animal shelter enclosure  to raise awareness about the plight of stray dogs and encourage people to adopt rather than buy canine pets.

Sean, a 35-year-old web-designer and volunteer at the Manchester and Cheshire Dogs’ Home, believes spending 35 days and nights in a cage is a good way to attract attention to the hideous plight of homeless dogs. It’s also a great way to raise some much-needed funds for the dog shelter, as he plans to broadcast his challenge on the internet with webcams and charge £5 ($7.50) per subscription. People will be able to watch a human living a dog’s life and Le Vagan plans to offer them a realistic experience. 35 days is the average stay for a dog at the Manchester-based animal shelter. Just like the canines brought here, Sean won’t eat anything for the first four days and will have to make do with just water and a blanket. After that he will be feasting on vegetarian dog food throughout the whole event. He will only be allowed one hour of freedom per day, to use the toilet and freshen up. To make his experience even more authentic, he even had a chip implanted in his shoulder which  is hooked up to the dog-care database.

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Here is a guy who can literally blow you away. Jemal Tkeshelashvili, from Georgia, is a superhuman with a very unique ability. He can blow up hot water bottles to the point where they explode, with his nose. Jemal currently holds the Guinness World Record for most hot water bottles burst with the nose in one minute.

What Jemal does might seem silly, but it’s actually quite extraordinary considering most people can barely blow up a latex balloon, let alone a thick rubber hot water bottle, with their nose. One might think it’s his lungs that do all the work, but tests have shown that his lungs are not much different than those of an average healthy person. He has good pulmonary volume, but it’s the force with which he’s capable of pushing out the air that makes him special. That means his strong intercostal and abdominal muscles push out all the air in his lungs really fast, creating enormous pressure. In 2009, the 23-year-old judo practitioner set a new record for most hot water bottles burst with the nose in one minute, managing to explode three of them, but th’s capable of much more impressive feats.

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Domenico Crolla, pizza master extraordinaire and owner of award-winning restaurant Bella Napoli, specializes in amazingly detailed celebrity portraits made exclusively with mozzarella cheese and tomato sauce on a pizza dough canvas.

Domenico’s career as a pizza artist began with the face of legendary action film star Bruce Lee. After receiving a “thank you” message from the late actor’s daughter, the pizzaiolo felt inspired to pursue his new hobby and create other edible celebrity portraits. Today his extensive collection numbers portraits of classic icons like Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra as well as delicious depictions of contemporary pop stars like Rihanna, Beyoncé or Robbie Williams. And he still receives thanks from them quite often. “The pizza for me is like high-fashion: a custom-made suit made by experienced and capable tailors, using fine fabrics and attention to detail,” Crolla says. And he definitely puts a lot of time and effort into each of his pizza artworks. He doesn’t use any kind of computer-generated images for his designs, preferring to place every ingredient on the pizza dough by hand until he gets it right. The most amazing thing about Domenico Crolla’s portraits is they look better when cooked.

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For the past 20 years Houston-based Larry Da Leopard has covered his entire body with over 1,000 leopard spots to achieve his goal of becoming a “manimal”, part man, part animal. He refers to himself as The Leopard Man.

Larry says he started getting tattoos with his friends in a time when skin inking was considered taboo, as a way of acting rebellious, but he never stopped. Even after covering his entire body, including the years and private parts, with tattoos, he considers himself a work in progress. He constantly adds new leopard spots wherever they still fit, and retouches his older ones if they fade after prolonged sun exposure. Although he says his parents cried the first time they saw his face full of permanent leopard spots and admits they make him look like a cartoon character, Larry is proud of the way he looks and likes showing off his skin art in public. He often goes out wearing only a Tarzan-inspired loin cloth and an animal-print coat, and hands out fliers for his tattoo parlor to passers-by.

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It’s hard to believe the woman in the photo below is actually 46-year-old and a mother of two. Jung Da Yeon is known as momjjang ajumma in her native land of South Korea which means “mom with a striking figure”, and it’s easy to see why.

But Jung Da Yeon didn’t always look like this. In 2003, after going through two pregnancies, she weighed 70 kilograms and looked like a normal housewife. According to most media reports, she just woke up one day and decided to do something about her dissatisfaction with her figure and weight, and I don’t mean not looking in the mirror for a very long time but strict dieting and physical exercise. However, Jung told the Wall Street Journal she was actually motivated to lose weight to relieve back pain, and that the perfect figure was only a side-effect.  She managed to lose 20 kilograms in just three months, and after posting some photos of her new self, the ambitious mother triggered what came to be known as South Korea’s “momjjang syndrome”. Housewives all around the country followed her example and started working out in an attempt to achieve the same toned physique. Before she knew it, Jung Da Yeon was making appearances on television, launching weight-loss books and videos, and building her very own fitness empire. The 46-year-old’s fame spread beyond Korea’s borders to Japan, where she launched an exercise-themed video game for the Nintendo Wii and opened an education center to train Figure-robics specialists.

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It’s amazing how some people can use rudimentary tools like pencils and paper to trick the brain and make their artworks look like they’re coming to life. Alessandro Diddi is one of these rare talented artists who creates anamorphic drawings that seem ready to jump off the page.

“When people see my drawings they are often pleasantly surprised, they fail to understand exactly how I’ve managed to achieve the 3D look,” Alessandro Diddi told the Daily Mail. Such reactions are perfectly understandable, considering his pencil-drawn designs seem perfectly life-like. But that’s only because a lot of people don’t understand the art of anamorphic design. “When you understand the mechanism of the anamorphic design, you realize that putting together drawing like this is really not so difficult,” he says. It’s hard to demonstrate without giving viewers a 2D views of his creations, but the talented Mr. Diddi uses angles and shading to trick your eyes and brain into seeing something magical. This technique has been used by artist’s all around the world for some time now, but his drawings are definitely something special. Using simple props like pencils, a wedding ring or his hands, Alessandro Diddi really breathes life into every one of his amazing sketches.

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The world famous Bushman of San Francisco, real name David Johnson, has been entertaining passers-by in Fisherman’s Wharf for over 30 years by hiding behind two Eucalyptus branches and jumping out at unsuspecting tourists as they walk by.

The Bushman of San Francisco is an alleged homeless man who rakes in a reported $60,000 a year from his original street performance, with just two Eucalyptus branches and the cardboard box he sits on. David Johnson was born in Indiana, where he worked as a crane operator crane operator, steel mill worker and truck driver before moving to San Francisco. Here he opened one of the first shoeshine stands on Market Street, but arthritis and growing competition from the busy Financial District forced him to look for a new way to make a living. After discovering some fallen branches under a tree, Johnson was inspired to use them in a street act that would eventually make him famous all around the world. Sitting on a makeshift stool, the Bushman hides behind the Eucalyptus branches waiting for tourists to walk by. When they get close enough, he jumps from behind the greenery or waves it in their direction scaring the daylights out of them, to the amusement of nearby spectators, many of whom reward his performance by throwing a quarter or a dollar into his jug.

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According to multiple Chinese media reports, wealthy and busy adults have found a new way to combat health issues caused by stress and strain – drinking human breast milk. They hire wet nurses who regularly provide the nutritious drink.

While many parents in China are struggling to find safe powdered milk for their babies, following a scandal over poisoned formula, rich and powerful adults from cities like Shenzen and Guangdong  are paying big bucks for fresh breast milk to keep in shape. The demand is apparently so great that companies are promoting and expanding their breast milk supply business from babies to adults. “Clients can choose to consume breast milk directly through breastfeeding … but they can always drink it from a breast pump if they feel uncomfortable,” Lin Jun, a manager of Xinxinyu Household Service Company told Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily. “Quite a few of our clients hire in-house wet nurses to ensure a supply of fresh breast milk on a daily base,” Lin said, adding that “wet nurses rarely raise objections as long as the price is right.” Apparently, most of those who indulge in drinking fresh breast milk are successful adults with high incomes and high-pressure jobs looking for a highly nutritious miracle cure to their health problems.

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The town of Greensburg, Indiana, is known as the “Tree City” for the over a dozen trees that have been growing out of the roof of the Decatur County Courthouse ever since 1870. They are believed to have sprouted from seeds in bird droppings.

In the year 1870, the citizens of Greensburg began to notice what looked like a small sprig growing on the northwest corner of the courthouse tower. No one paid much attention to it at first, but as the shrub grew into a young tree, it became the talk of the town. A few years later, five new sprouts were spotted on the tower roof, threatening to form a small grove atop the 110-foot-tall tower. Authorities were worried the tree roots might cause irreparable damage to the roof, so in 1888 a steeplejack was hired to cut down the smaller trees, leaving just one, which in time grew to about fifteen feet with a diameter of almost five inches at its base. It continued to brave the storms for many years, until it finally died, and was removed to a place in the Decatur County Historical Society Museum. But that was not the end of the now famous courthouse tower tree. In the meantime, another tree appeared on the southeast corner of the tower, and grew to a considerable height in just a few years time.

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The things people will put themselves through to give up smoking. Case in point İbrahim Yücel, a 42-year-old smoker from Kütahya, Turkey who recently decided to wear a locked metal cage over his head to fight his addiction.

İbrahim Yücel has been smoking for the last 26 years, and despite several attempts to quit he couldn’t break his two-packs-a-day dirty habit. Every year, on his three children’s birthdays and on his wedding anniversary he would give up cigarettes, but he never went more than a few days without them. His family, his friends and co-workers all tried to convince him to stop using tobacco cigarettes, but he just couldn’t do it. After losing his father to smoking-induced lung cancer a few months ago, İbrahim realized smoking just wasn’t worth losing his life over and putting his wife and children through the same hardships. But the Turkish technician also knew he lacked the willpower to quit by usual means, so he came up with a rather unusual solution. Inspired by motorcycle helmets, he decided to build a metal wire cage that would prevent him from lighting up no matter how badly he craved a cigarette.

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